Pushtak to Shove

...There is a running gag involving hummus that should grow old quickly but only gets funnier as the movie goes along—and another, more obscure running gag about an orange soda called “Fizzy Bubblech” that may be even funnier to anyone who has ever tried to imbibe a soft drink in the Middle East...

...The movie is a terrible mess, with about six different plotlines going at once that seem to have been stitched together out of a hodgepodge of drafts of a screenplay that’s been in the works for a decade...

...Would that his Israeli accent were similarly inspired...

...Zohan keeps saying he wants an end to the bloodshed...

...1980’s Eyewitness and 1991’s Homicide feature naifs (William Macy and Joe Mantegna respectively) running afoul of murderous Zionist conspiracies...

...For no reason whatsoever, and with no laughs garnered whatsoever, the villain of the piece is a Trump-like real-estate developer played by Michael Buffer, the man who shouts “Let’s get ready to rumble...

...he’s also what Israelis call a pushtak, a greaser, a bridge-and-tunnel guy from the land of milk and honey, a Jewish Guido...

...His father, played by the great old stand-up Shelley Berman, delivers a gasp-inducingly funny monologue about his son’s homosexual leanings when he hears about the hair ambitions...

...He believes he is God’s gift to the world, especially to the ladies, and he takes himself with the utmost seriousness even as others laugh at him...

...There is, as usual for Sandler, plenty of dumb humor of the sort that gives dumb humor a bad name, but that delights his 14-year-old-boy fan base...

...In fact, everything in this movie that has to do with Israel and Israelis is hilarious, if wildly over the top...

...Perhaps the best joke on the subject is the most inside joke of all: The woman playing Zohan’s Palestinian love interest is Emmanuelle Chriqui, who was born and raised an Orthodox Jew...

...Cowriter Smigel, who is the brains and voice of the genius foul-mouthed puppet called Triumph the Comic Insult Dog, plays the irascible manager of the store, and with a perfect Israeli accent...

...maybe one of them coiffed Sandler or Smigel and this fi lm was born...

...His parents won’t hear of him taking up another line of work...

...he is informed by a recorded voice that no help can be offered because there are negotiations going on, but to call back as soon as negotiations break down...

...In Last Embrace, a littleknown early movie by the Oscar-winning Jonathan Demme, Roy Scheider runs afoul of hit men from the Jewish state...

...This is one of several good and unexpectedly sophisticated jokes about the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict that pop up every now and then...

...This may be the only time in history that the Tribe brand of kosher chick pea-based foodstuffs has found itself in a position to secure product placement in a major motion picture...

...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...

...There have been on-screen Israelis, but interestingly for an industry supposedly controlled by Jews, they’ve mostly been villains...

...Inside Israel, the pushtak is a dated stereotype, a fi gure of sport from the 1970s and ’80s...

...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Adam Sandler’s lunatic new comedy, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, is a landmark of sorts: Aside from Steven Spielberg’s Munich, it is the fi rst major Hollywood studio release in nearly half-a-century featuring an Israeli protagonist...

...Since this is a Sandler movie, Zohan’s talents—he’s a counterterrorism secret agent—are mostly played for laughs...

...The classic pushtak saunters down a Tel Aviv street with a pack of cigarettes rolled up inside his T-shirt sleeve...

...Out of nowhere, in the last 10 minutes, the bad guy summons a redneck (played by, of all people, the rock singer Dave Matthews) to take out the block...

...Homicide was written and directed by David Mamet, who has become a scourge of anti-Semites the world over, which is nice, but he seems not to have noticed his own movie is based on a classic anti-Semitic plot point...

...Sandler and his collaborators, the brilliant comic writers Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow, seem completely aware of this, since their Zohan is obsessed with “going disco disco” and sports a hairdo copied from a 1983 Paul Mitchell styling catalogue...

...cop played by Richard Gere...

...What makes You Don’t Mess with the Zohan a breakthrough, therefore, is that Sandler’s character is nothing less than a superhero...

...Later, a would-be terrorist calls the Hezbollah help line...

...You have to go back all the way to 1960 to fi nd Sandler’s predecessor— a glowing Paul Newman laboring heroically to help bring the Jewish state into being in Otto Preminger’s epic Exodus (a movie so excruciatingly long that, during a screening, Mort Sahl stood up three hours in and called out, “Otto, let my people go...

...But in an odd sort of way, the humor only reinforces the idea...

...There were a lot of Israeli hairstylists in New York in the early 1980s...

...He keeps capturing the foremost Palestinian terrorist, the Phantom (John Turturro), only to hear that the Phantom has been traded back to the Palestinians for an Israeli captive to be named later...

...The dazzling opening scene, set to a catchy number by an Israeli hiphop band, shows Zohan walking the length of the beach in Tel Aviv playing hacky sack, dancing, fi ghting, and hosting a barbecue until an army helicopter comes to fetch him for yet another dangerous mission...

...his mother declares...

...Zohan fi nds himself seeking employment at an Israeli-run electronics store in New York with a sign out front that says “Going Out of Business”—only to learn that the actual name of the store is “Going Out of Business...

...He wanted to be a hand model,” a colleague says sadly, “but then the electronics business got a hold of him, and he was never the same...

...as Zohan hurls him off a ledge...

...Zohan worships at the altar of Paul Mitchell because, even though he can scamper through a Beirut neighborhood like Spider-Man, he wants to chuck it all and become a hairdresser...

...You’re Rembrandt with a grenade...

...The Arabs and Jews must work together to defeat the evil White Man...

...He can literally twist people into pretzels, and at one point he wills a hand lopped off by a terrorist interrogator to rise from the fl oor, grab his enemy’s dagger, and stab the guy in the back...

...As Zohan and a bad guy fi ght, they have an argument about whose people were there fi rst, with the bad guy screaming “It’s not so cut-and-dried...

...He is threatening a small strip of downtown Manhattan where there are Arab businesses on one side of the street and Israeli businesses on the other side of the street...

...half the time he sounds French...

...And every 10 minutes or so, it makes you explode with laughter...

...The joke here is that Zohan is not only Israel’s fi nest terror combatant...

...Dated the type may be, but since the pushtak is unknown to all but a few million people on earth, Sandler’s use of it to craft a new comic character is inspired...

...In 1990’s Internal Affairs, the lascivious Israeli wife of an American arms dealer (her name is Tova, no less) is thrilled to be violated under the table in a restaurant by a corrupt L.A...

...Don’t give up on your dream, Zohan...

...You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is unusual because there are all sorts of tantalizing comic ideas fl oating around in that shallow pool...