Shocker: Adam Sandler thrashed by critic

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Maybe you do mess with the Zohan. Variety has posted an early review of Adam Sandler’s new comedy, ‘You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,’ pronouncing the tale of an Israeli super-spy who heads to America to follow his dream of being a suave hair stylist as ‘a mess and then some.’ It’s not actually a cultural shocker to see Sandler take a critical bashing. As a rule, critics have embraced the likes of Judd Apatow, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell, while dismissing Sandler as a dopey class clown. But with Apatow and Robert Smigel weighing in as co-writers on the ‘Zohan’ script, we had some faint hope that Sandler might have raised his game a notch, especially since he uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (not exactly a throw-away comic device) as a backdrop for his story.

As Variety’s Brian Lowry writes, any high hopes we might have had are dashed:

But why are Sandler’s comedies such thin gruel?

All too many modern Hollywood comedy stars share a similar tragic flaw--they don’t want to be challenged. Having suffered through years of strife on the comedy club circuit, having battled to get their sketches on ‘SNL,’ they feel they’ve earned the right to be the boss. They’re allergic to working with gifted comedy directors. (They don’t like to work with gifted actresses either, but that’s a subject for another day.) Sandler has taken the occasional career challenge, starring in ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ (with Paul Thomas Anderson) and ‘Spanglish’ (James Brooks) but his meat and potatoes box-office vehicles are directed by faceless comedy traffic cops like Dennis Dugan (who has done four Sandler films, including ‘Zohan’), Peter Segal (’50 First Dates’) and Steven Brill (‘Mr. Deeds’). As Lowry puts it in his ‘Zohan’ review, Dugan directs ‘the star and his posse sparingly, bordering on not at all.’

Much the same thing has happened with Mike Myers, who outside of his work with Jay Roach on ‘Austin Powers,’ has been so fixated on being in control of everything that he’s hired directors with virtually zero feature film experience, including production designer Bo Welch (who directed ‘Cat in the Hat’), TV director Thomas Schlamme (‘So I Married an Axe Murderer’) and Marco Schnabel, a second-unit director from ‘Austin Powers in Goldmember’ who is at the helm of ‘The Love Guru.’

With hired hands in the director’s chair, laughing obligingly at all their takes, the star’s comedy antics go uncontested, leaving us with a string of self-indulgent, one-note performances. Many of the best comedies have benefited from creative ferment and tussles, notably the battle of wills that broke out on ‘Tootsie’ between Sydney Pollack and Dustin Hoffman. Peter Sellers made plenty of bad movies in his day, but no one can accuse him of shying away from working with great minds, collaborating with the likes of Stanley Kubrick (‘Dr. Strangelove’), Hal Ashby (‘Being There’), Vittorio de Sica (‘After the Fox’), George Roy Hill (‘The World of Henry Orient’) and of course, Blake Edwards on his best Pink Panther outings.

Unfortunately, Sandler doesn’t seem eager to push himself, preferring to stay with safe characters and easy gags and surround himself with friendly faces who will indulge his fondness for big penis jokes and other comic whims. Sandler usually gets the last laugh, since his films almost always perform handsomely at the box office, which only serves as a depressing reminder that comedy fans today don’t expect much of a challenge when they go to the movies either.