Zohan (Adam Sandler) is a top Israeli commando who becomes a hairstylist in New York in the movie You Don't Mess with the Zohan. (Tracy Bennett/Columbia Pictures)

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan opens with Zohan, Israel’s most famous super-spy, on vacation, and so he’s wearing Daisy Dukes, flip-flops and a Mariah Carey T-shirt. When not on vacation, he might select something blousier and unbuttoned above the waist, but whether frying fish naked or strangling an enemy, the sandals always stay.

Adam Sandler plays the titular assassin, a Teflon-coated counter-terrorist who can take out a dozen armed men at once and turn hummus into a weapon. Zohan is bored with his Bondian excellence and the endless Israeli-Arab bloodshed. “When will it end?” he asks his mother (Dina Doron), who replies, “We’ve been fighting for 2,000 years. It can’t be much longer.” Quietly, Zohan harbours his own hopes and dreams: he wants to be a hairdresser. At night, he falls asleep clutching a book of Paul Mitchell hairstyles, circa 1987.

Superspy Zohan (Adam Sandler) is bored with his Bondian excellence, and the endless Israeli-Arab bloodshed. “When will it end?” he asks his mother, who replies, “We’ve been fighting for 2,000 years. It can’t be much longer.”

Concepts don’t get much higher than this, and it’s safe to say that almost no one besides Adam Sandler, who co-wrote and produced, could get backing for a film about a Mossad-agent-cum-hairdresser. He once sold a film about a guy who has to complete grades 1 to 12 in a month. That movie, Billy Madison, was a huge hit 13 years ago, and though Sandler’s more recent dramatic efforts – Reign over Me; Spanglish – haven’t found audiences, even a throwaway Sandler comedy like I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry can earn $120 million. With Zohan, Sony must have double-dollar signs in its eyes: Sandler’s co-authors are the unstoppably bankable Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel, formerly a Saturday Night Live writer and creator of Conan O’Brien’s Quebec-mocking Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

Though they were roommates in their pre-millionaire days, Sandler and Apatow seem, on paper, like a strange combination. Sandler’s approach – the penis jokes are, ahem, long and abundant – is broader and less cerebral than Apatow’s gentler, neurosis-propelled comedy. But the two share an affinity for wide-eyed, optimistic male leads. Indeed, Zohan has the innocence of The 40 Year-Old Virgin and the gotta-hump crudeness of Happy Gilmore.

Zohan practises his technique with client Gail (Lainie Kazan). (Tracy Bennett/Columbia Pictures)

To follow his hairdressing dream, Zohan stages his own death at the hands of his Palestinian counterpart, The Phantom (John Turturro), and stows away in the baggage hold of a plane bound for New York. Naming himself “Scrappy Coco” — after two dogs he meets in hiding (and Edward Scissorhands to hairstyle absurdity) — the assassin sets out to make it in the big city.

Here, the film gets a little smarter than it deserves to be, asking the question: How do the cultural cues of one nation get read — and misread — in another? Zohan’s sex-machine strut and gold-medallion-wearing, party-pronouncing cries of “Disco! Disco!” make him a hero at home, but in New York, he’s an unemployable social pariah. The joke is that Zohan’s self-confidence and machismo — which translates as gay — are uncrackable. He’ll behave like the same rock star here as he was there, even though no one is cheering him on — yet.

New York is filled with people like Zohan trying to live their own updated Horatio Alger stories: Chris Rock cameos as a cabbie from Jamaica; Zohan’s Israeli friend Oori (Ido Mosseri) works in an electronics store called Going Out of Business. New partakers of the American dream — Arab, Israeli and otherwise — become dry cleaners and newspaper sellers, but Zohan is a reminder that one’s old identity (and attendant status) lingers just below the surface. While strolling the city, Zohan plays Good Samaritan and steps in to mediate a moment of New York rage between a cyclist and a driver. An enraged yuppie yells at him; “Go back to your pretzel stand!” So Zohan beats him up – with his feet: “Smell it, smell it — now take it. That’s for you.” The moment of sweet (and stinky) revenge will get cheers, as Sandler takes a generic underdog and has him stand in for any number of invisible, maligned segments of urban life.

The stereotypes are fast and loose and unflattering to both Arabs and Israelis, leaving much opportunity for offence if equal-opportunity stupidity enrages you.

The only place willing to employ Zohan is a salon run by a gorgeous Palestinian named Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui); the actress is there solely for scenery, awaiting her legitimizing “romantic interest” sequence. Zohan starts by sweeping up, but using his military focus — he backflips to catch a piece of falling hair as it’s cut. He’s soon doing much more, including having sex with his “mature” female clientele. It never occurs to him that he wouldn’t — so committed is Zohan to customer satisfaction. This “horny granny” school of comedy – one of his customers is Charlotte Rae (Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life) – is the film’s low point. (Actually, a dog reaction shot to the intergenerational coupling goes a notch lower.) Is it really still inherently hilarious that an older woman might want to have sex?

Zohan’s cover is nearly blown by Salim, a Palestinian cab driver played by Rob Schneider in brownface. (Later this summer, Robert Downey Jr. will appear in blackface in the comedy Tropic Thunder. Behold the threshold of a rather dubious trend.) Salim wants vengeance for a long-ago goat theft, and he enlists some fellow New York Arabs to go after Zohan. These sidekicks are hardly wily terrorists; they’re overworked, exhausted and clueless. At one point, they call the Hezbollah “help line” for bomb-building expertise. (It’s out of service while peace talks continue: “Please call back when negotiations break down.”)

Zohan begins a romance with a Palestinian-American named Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui). (Tracy Bennett/Columbia Pictures)

The stereotypes are fast and loose and unflattering to both Arabs and Israelis (but maybe more so to Arabs), leaving much opportunity for offence if equal-opportunity stupidity enrages you. This isn’t a film that’s going to smooth relations in the Middle East, but it tries awkwardly to serve a palatable love-one-another message to the masses. There are brief moments of political conversation between the two sides – “I’m just saying, it’s not so clear cut” shouts one assailant as Zohan boots him from a balcony – but unity only occurs when Palestinians and Jews come together against corporate America, the last unobjectionable villain of our PC times. As the factions unite against an evil mall developer, a lame Mariah Carey appearance and looping, endless sex gags bog down the third act.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan isn’t as culturally astute or as risky a film as that other foreigner-arriviste film, Borat. Kazakhstani Borat, the ultimate outsider, remains perpetually on the borders of society, living in violation of codes he doesn’t know exist. But the world will eventually come round to Zohan because in Sandler movies, Sandler’s goofballs exist to soften a callous universe in need of loosening up. There’s no salve for a wounded culture – or two – like a good penis joke.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan opens June 6.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.