Given that an Adam Sandler film has roughly the same relationship to reality that a dirty limerick has to a Shakespeare sonnet, the temptation to take a semi-serious look at a film like You Don�t Mess With The Zohan, his latest, is hardly obligatory. It�s the story of a superhuman Mossad agent who, tired of the apparently endless conflict between Israel and its neighbours, fakes his death and moves to New York to pursue his dream of styling hair at Paul Mitchell�s salon.
It also features almost non-stop dick jokes, and possibly the worst Israeli accent ever committed to film, but considering how few Hollywood films deal with Israel or Israelis except in the most cursory fashion, a little glance at Zohan�s motley cinematic predecessors is probably more worthwhile than pondering the running MILF and GMILF gags.
Not counting decades of biblical epics, the keystone of Hollywood�s Israel movies is probably Exodus, Otto Preminger�s 1960 epic adaptation of Leon Uris� bestselling novel, and a relic of a time when Israel was still riding on a wave of grudging international goodwill. That film, along with Cast A Giant Shadow (1966) and Black Sunday (1976) helped foster the image of the Israeli soldier, commando and secret agent as fantastically resourceful and courageous � an image pushed over into parody by Sandler�s Zohan. The image of Sandler taking a terrorist�s gun apart before he fires a shot is really only a mild comedic exaggeration of Robert Shaw as a Mossad agent in Black Sunday, hanging off the Goodyear blimp while trying to prevent Black September terrorists from detonating a bomb over the Super Bowl.
Israel�s retaliation for the murder of Israeli athletes by PLO terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics helped bring the Mossad out of the shadows, and Israel�s reputation for audacity was further buffed up by Raid On Entebbe, a 1977 TV movie featuring a young James Woods in a proto-Zohan role, playing a sniper on the commando team that freed 100 Israeli hostages in a daring real-life nighttime raid. Since then, however, Israel�s public image has suffered a relentless harrowing, and on the movie screen Mossad agents have regularly been glimpsed in passing, usually retired and working as mercenaries in the thuggish supporting cast of action films, or suffering from guilt and doubt, like Eric Bana in Steven Spielberg�s recent Munich.
Israeli society gets portrayed with a lighter touch � in Zohan, Tel Aviv comes off like a cross between an Ibiza rave and Pride weekend in Miami. There�s plentiful basis for this in fact, but its movie genesis can be glimpsed in the throngs of attractive young Israeli soldiers with their chic khaki uniforms and Sten guns in films like Exodus and Cast A Giant Shadow, particularly the leggy young Israeli women in their rolled-up shorts and sun hats. The notion of sexy Israel probably begins with Senta Berger meeting Kirk Douglas in Cast A Giant Shadow, telling Douglas about her husband in the Palmach, while admitting drily that the sex isn�t so good, and encouraging Douglas to try his chances with her anyway. Forty years later this has metastasized into Zohan nonchalantly sexing up a cohort of elderly hair salon clients, which may, depending on how the film is received when it opens this Friday, be added to the long list of adversity that the Israel has endured since its founding.
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