The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : It’s Sandler all the way

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Monday, Sep 22, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

It’s Sandler all the way

Silence please: Shulie Cowen and Adam Sandler in ‘You don’t mess with the Zohan’.

Film: You don’t mess with the Zohan

Cast: Adam Sandler, Shulie Cowen

Director: Dennis Dogan

If it were a Hindi film, a critic would have been ripping it apart. The connoisseurs would have sensed it as a front benchers’ delight and kept away. But it is not a Hindi film. Thank God. If it were not an Adam Sandler film, it would have been downright intolerable.

So, the star is the saviour of this Dennis Dogan-directed film that comes replete with lots of fun — some clean, much of it crass.

Then there is that little message that does not take much to decode: every war has to end, even the Palestine-Israeli conflict. And there is life beyond a war.

For academic purposes, in this otherwise routine Sandler comedy, he plays an Israeli army man who would rather be a hair designer or stylist. Why? Simply because cutting hair “is pleasurable” and “and does not hurt”. Quite a thing to say for a soldier almost always in the thick of action.

As a soldier, he is a man no foe can destroy. Bullets rest in the web of his palm, get lodged in the nostrils or worse, are caught mid-air, a la our own Rajnikanth. He can also clean up half a dozen guys on his own without breaking into a sweat, or pierce iron with the ease of a hot knife sliding across butter! All through the treatment is light and funny, keeping the laughs going.

Finally, the soldier leaves the gun and takes to scissors. Cut to America where the Palestines and Israelis share the same market. We have lots of masala as Sandler turns a charmer, winning and, well, downing, women all the time. He is supposed to style their hair, he goes well beyond the call of duty!

Throw in the mall mafia who would have the market shut for a multiplex and you know the film is drawing to a close with a lesson: mankind’s problems are the same!

ZIYA US SALAM

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