Don't Bother Messing With the Zohan

One bad turn deserves another. Actor, producer, and co-writer Adam Sandler's new vehicle, "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," is such a witless, joyless, and cynically conceived enterprise that the film deserves to be discussed in movie critic clichés as conceptually threadbare as the misguided creative impetus that spawned it.

Critic Cliché no. 1 — Hoist a film on the petard of its title. "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" is indeed a mess. Almost from the first scene, the film clings to coherence with the desperation of a birthday-party clown mistakenly dispatched to a stag party. Unlike such recent, comparatively high-minded Sandler vehicles as "Spanglish" and "Reign Over Me," "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" is clearly targeted at Mr. Sandler's core audience of boys 13 and younger (the "Billy Madison" fans who never grew up). Rated PG-13 for "crude and sexual content throughout," according to the MPAA, "Zohan" presents such a numbing and cacophonous barrage of ill-timed slapstick and misfired below-the-waist humor that Mr. Sandler and his longtime director, Dennis Dugan, have succeeded in creating a kind of simulated cinematic ADD.

Critic Cliché no. 2 — It took three guys to write this? Plucked from an all-too-brief vacation devoted to playing hacky sack with his gluteal muscles and barbecuing naked with a bevy of Israeli beach bunnies, Israeli secret agent Zohan (Mr. Sandler) is assigned the task of dispatching a Palestinian terrorist called the Phantom (John Turturro). But Zohan, who pores over a vintage Paul Mitchell salon style book with the same intensity with which he fieldstrips and loads his weapons, dreams of beating his sword into thinning shears and making a new life for himself as a New York hairstylist.

Once Zohan arrives in fun city, the film's plot — involving a mythical Arab-Israeli downtown Manhattan neighborhood, a megalomaniacal real-estate developer, white supremacist mercenaries, an incompetent Arab terrorist cell, a budding romance between Zohan and his Palestinian salon boss, Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui), the return of the Phantom, and a climactic hacky-sack tournament — randomly unfolds like a series of mismatched panels from an Israeli Bazooka Joe gum comic.

Co-writers Judd Apatow, Robert Smigel (a veteran of "Saturday Night Live" and "Late Night With Conan O'Brien"), and Mr. Sandler appear to have forgotten to develop their script past the notes-on-cocktail-napkins stage. In lieu of actual comedy, Zohan, his New York hostess Gail (Lainie Kazan), his Israeli pal Oori (Ido Mosseri), a cab driver and amateur Hezbollah terrorist Salim (Rob Schneider, inevitably), and seemingly everyone else on hand joylessly gnaw away at bilingual crotch jokes and dull sketch comedy setups that go nowhere. In "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," the gag is over not when the laughter stops, but when a music cue signals the arrival of the next abortive scene. Sony Columbia has advertised the film heavily, and I can assure you that, Critic Cliché no. 3 — all the funny parts are in the trailer.

Critic Cliché no. 4 — What was he thinking? The prospect of a decent paycheck and low-pressure shoots on the sunny Israeli Riviera and in his hometown clearly proved irresistible to Mr. Turturro. But the estimable actor and director of the woefully underappreciated "Romance and Cigarettes" mugs, gawks, and sputters through his parts of "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" with such heartbreaking lack of cohesion or evident sense of play that one is tempted to turn away from the screen in embarrassment. It says a lot about a movie that boasts cameos by Chris Rock, a platoon of other "SNL" alums, stand-up comedy pioneer Shelley Berman, and soft-rock star Dave Matthews that the most memorable acting performance on hand comes courtesy of Mariah Carey.

Critic Cliché no. 5 — A film like this is critic-proof. True enough. But if the audience Wednesday night at the Ziegfeld can be taken as any reliable forecast, "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" may prove audience-proof. The laughs among those present in Mr. Sandler's core demographic were few and far between. Aside from Pavlovian applause whenever yet another "SNL" regular appeared on screen, the row of tween lads seated in front of me maintained an indifferent but nevertheless respectful silence more akin to indulging an overbearing parent's condescending attempts at humor than an unsupervised matinee at the multiplex.