Adam Sandler plays Zohan Dvir, an Israeli counter-terrorism army commando who, after growing tired of the Israel/Palestine conflict, fakes his own death in order to pursue his dream. He wants to become a hairstylist in America.<br /><br />Like Spielberg's "Munich", the underlying point in "Zohan" is simple. Why can't Middle Easterners, their admitted religious and political differences notwithstanding, just make love, make money, and eat hummus in peace? It's a trite message, but what's complex is the way Sandler and his writers have abstracted the conflict.<br /><br />Zohan is a Jewish superhero. He's Israel's national perception of itself. He's invincible, strong, and effortlessly kicks Palestinian butt. But Zohan has another side which his country won't let him nurture. He's loving and kind and simply wants to be a hairdresser. "I want to make things silky smooth," he says. He wants to cast off his hyper-masculine national identity and become something else.<br /><br />The film is filled with sex and hummus (love and sperm), as Zohan moves about, bringing love and joy to others. Zohan wants to escape his superhero counter-terrorist Israeli persona. He wants to go to America and make hair "silky smooth." Of course the other Jews all mock him for this. They call him "feigele" or "homo", mocking his perceived weakness. Only at the end, with his financial and personal success, do his parents accept Zohan. You can be what you want, they say, so long as you're rich and successful at it.<br /><br />The film gets more complex when Zohan reaches America. Sandler takes the Jewish inferiority complex and plays it against American superiority. Thus, your Jewish superhero is only ever good enough to be a lowly American hairdresser. America, a melting pot of all cultures, assimilates all creeds and races, removes their historical and tribal baggage, and transforms their faith into a belief in consumer culture.<br /><br />As such, the second half of the film takes place on a New York street in which one half is owned by Jewish shops and the other half is owned by Palestinian shops. Both sides live in harmony, selling to their customers and raking in the cash. There are no conflicts here, no wars, only peaceful trading. The plot of the film buys into the "we're all the same" philosophy so clearly that Zohan's arch nemesis, a Palestinian superhero called The Phantom (John Turturro), has the same dream as Zohan. He wants to open a shoe store. Both superheroes, one Palestinian, one Jewish, have dreams of simply opening a shop and tending to their own business. It's the ultimate capitalist dream: to make money in peace.<br /><br />In Spielberg's "Munich", we watch Avner revoke his country and turn away from violence. In "Zohan", Sandler's maturation is far more complex. He replaces the childish craziness of the Middle East with the sanity of the United States (USA=diverse mother land of capitalism) and then replaces his adolescent promiscuity with monogamous marriage. Zohan ceases to be a pro-nationalist superman, and becomes the bourgeois, monogamous, hetero businessman. The bland hero of every American dream. He has a house, a car, a wife, and he's happy. America placates needs, removes ethnic tension, and keeps you sufficiently happy until you die of old age.<br /><br />By the end of the film, it turns out that the real enemy is a business man called Walbridge (Wall Street), who wants to take the land from the Jews and the Palestinians in order to construct a huge shopping mall. Wallbridge gathers a group of uneducated redneck, appeals to their patriotism, bigotry and racism, and gets them to start a war between the Arabs. The film goes further than "Munich", in that it says that racial tension is really a manifestation of class tension, and that Middle Eastern conflicts are really the product of the whiteman's greed.<br /><br />And so the conflict in New York is not between Arabs and Israelis but between the rich white Walbridge (who wants to pit the racial minorities against one another and claim the real estate as his own) and the working class coalition of hummus-eaters. The Jews and the Palestinians thus form an alliance, defeat Walbridge and his bigot army, and unite to build a mall of their own.<br /><br />So what we have here are Jews and Palestinians holding hands and creating their own American dream, their own Eden, without America. They build their own mall, in which each can live out their own flavour of the bland American dream. Malls are good, capitalism works when it's personal, religious and racial differences are illusory or superficial, blanket bigotry is the province of greedy white men, and heterosexuality and monogamous marriage is a natural part of growing up.<br /><br />"Don't Mess with the Zohan" isn't as funny as Sandler's best movies ("Wedding Singer", "Happy Gilmore", "50 First Dates" etc), but it's an honest film which at least tries to delve into its issues. By placing the Palestinian conflict in socio-economic context, "Zohan" is actually far more complex than Spielberg's "Munich", which was far too frightened to say anything. <br /><br />6/10 - This is your typical Adam Sandler comedy, albeit with clever subtext. Zohan's dream is to reverse the Zionist transformation of the effeminate European scholar into the macho soldier of God. The film would have worked better as a satire than a straight up comedy, but Adam Sandler is too lowbrow to do such things. The other problem with all these Middle East movies, are that they're all made by rich white Jews. Aside from John Turturro, all the major Palestinians are played by Jewish actors.