Here's my thoughts on Adam Sandler -- I enjoyed him on SNL and I also liked his first few movies. They were pretty stupid but Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Waterboy et al were funny at least on that level. At some point though, I think he started to fall into a formula that wasn't all that great. I think he hit the wall for me from Big Daddy on.. the schtick just wasn't that funny anymore, it was just cliche'd and tired.
So anyway haven't seen anything of his in awhile. Mr. Deeds was horrible and the longest yard remake was OK at best. I think I missed a few in there where he was gay or on an island or something possibly with a talking dog.. I don't know. I was going to happily let Zohan pass as well but Xenoina scored some sneak preview tickets so we went last week. You've seen the trailers, the premise is Sandler is a crack Isreali commando who goes to New York to cut the hair. Think about every gag you can about this and throw in cameos from every Sandler movie regular you can and you have the Zohan.
Overall it's not.. terrible. It's pretty much your Adam Sandler movie but it had a few laughs. The preocupation with Penis jokes remain as does an overabundance of CGI sight gags. Some things work, other things don't and by the end even the ones that work are beaten so far into the ground that they definitely aren't funny by the end (ie jokes involving hummus). I think my main problem is it tries to pack in too many sub-plots.. you've got everything from Palestenian terrorists to racist rednecks and Micheal Buffer playing the evil corporate guy trying to take out a small community to build a mall ala the setup to most episodes of the A-Team and every other cliche film you can think of.
I can't really recommend this only that it's probably the best Adam Sandler film i've seen in awhile but that's not really saying much. It's not as good as his "early" stuff (is it really that old anyway to be calling it 'early'?) but it appears to be better than just the absolute bullshit he has been making. At the end of the day though it's still a cliche / gimmick film that has some laughs and quite a few misses and for whatever reason about a solid 2 minutes of Sandler's ass in it.
