Hairy situations

With a snip here and a smack there, Adam Sandler amusingly tackles terrorism in 'Zohan'

Adam Sandler stars as an Israeli commando who fakes his own death to become a stylist in New York. (Tracy Bennett/columbia pictures)

If "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" isn't the bravest movie ever made about current Arab-Israeli relations, it's at least the bravest movie ever made about current Arab-Israeli relations featuring a former Mossad agent who shags Lainie Kazan.

Nothing freaks the filmmakers out. Adam Sandler, as the agent, catches fish with his derriere, while John Turturro plays a Palestinian terrorist mastermind who opens a fast-food shack. The movie pretends this is all perfectly normal for almost two blissfully arbitrary hours.

Zohan is a celebrated government assassin who, tired of fighting Palestinians, fakes his death and flees to Manhattan to realize his dream of doing American hair. On the trip west, Zohan gives himself a makeover that turns him from a shaggy Hacky Sack enthusiast into a goateed Ben Affleck look-alike. Rejected from one of Paul Mitchell's salons (he drools over "The Lexington" and other haircuts in an ancient Mitchell style book), Zohan seeks work in a Palestinian-run salon, managed by a no-nonsense beauty (Emmanuelle Chriqui). The parlor's on a street split between Israelis and Arabs.

Lest anyone know he's alive, Zohan works under the name Scrappy Coco and moves in with Kazan and her grown baby of a son (Nick Swardson). At the salon, he starts sweeping up hair and, after his big styling break, winds up the star of the shop, the lines of women out the door testifying as much to Zohan's way with a flamboyantly ugly haircut as to his lascivious determination to sex them up afterward. He never admits it, but his hero appears to be Warren Beatty in "Shampoo," not Mitchell.

Alas, the hair isn't all that's a mess. The film has a drab, budgetless look, and thdirector Dennis Dugan, making his fourth Sandler picture, shows a kind of negative aptitude for filmmaking. It's all he can do to keep the jokes afloat. But the movie's grubbiness actually makes the winking, sub-Hong Kong action sequences (Sandler delivering a flying kick sideways in real time, for example) surreally funny. The movie's visual tackiness accessorizes nicely with its hero's.

Sandler wrote "Zohan" with Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow, and amid many of their very funny ideas is a plot that doesn't declare itself until the last rushed act. The upside is that it requires Turturro's character to show up in the movie's imaginary Manhattan enclave to destroy his archenemy. The worst idea in the movie is the fact that the filmmakers couldn't find more Middle Easterners to play Middle Easterners. Too much of it involves Rob Schneider as a cab-driving Palestinian nincompoop who has a bone to pick with Zohan. But why so little of the terrific bit players? Ido Mosseri as a fast-talking Israeli who runs a discount electronics store, and Daoud Heidami, as one of Schneider's level-headed co-conspirators, pocket the movie.

Ethnic impersonations aside, the movie creates a capitalist America running on proud immigrant energy and a passion for the music of Mariah Carey. The movie's villains aren't the Israelis or the Palestinians. They're the rednecks and white-collar titans desperately colluding to defame and displace outsiders. With its burning storefronts and arch racial hostilities (the musician Dave Matthews plays one of the rednecks; the boxing announcer Michael Buffer plays the vain, gentrifying property developer), the "Zohan" finale feels like a cartoon version of the infernal climax in "Do the Right Thing." The movie suggests that seemingly opposed factions - poor white people and rich ones; Israelis and Palestinians - can unite to fight a common foe. It's a battle for a corner of America that's passed off as horseplay.

It seemed impossible that Sandler would shed his moron shtick and evolve into any kind of political farceur. But in two superbly titled comedies - "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry" being the other - he's come closer than anyone has lately to Mel Brooks's kitchen-sink burlesques and John Waters's uproarious erogenous adventures. "Zohan" eagerly combines both. Nothing has brought me more cheap pleasure at a movie this year than the sight of shampoo and conditioner bottles falling off a rocking wall while comedian Alec Mapa, as a fellow stylist, tries to keep a straight face. He does a much better job than I did.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.