In "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," Adam Sandler manages to stereotype pretty much everyone in the Western Hemisphere.

It's not like he's bravely confronting political correctness by reveling in expressing the nastiest stereotypes; it's more like he hasn't heard of political correctness and is unfamiliar with the concept of stereotypes in the first place. His mind is stuck at the 8-year-old level.

Sandler plays the Zohan, a fabled Israeli special-operations hero. This hero decides he has had enough of fighting and decides to immigrate to America and become a hairdresser at the famous Paul Mitchell boutique.

To be fair, there's some humor in the way Sandler and his pet director, Dennis Dugan, envision the Zohan as a gymnast rather than a commando. And the charm continues for a bit: The Zohan gets to America, tries to get a job at the Mitchell boutique and instead ends up in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that is a mini-Middle East of its own, with Palestinians on one side of the street and Jews on the other. He, of course, can find work only in a shop owned by a Palestinian woman (Emmanuelle Chriqui, the best thing by far in the picture.)

The movie is gross but not unfunny as it covers the Zohan's rise through hair culture, aided by his steamy heterosexuality, his lack of inhibition and his stereotypical career aggressiveness, until the old ladies are lined up all the way to the Bronx for a few minutes of bliss in the Zohan's chair.

When he's not modeling his biceps, he's showing off his showbiz connections with a batch of cameos from such luminaries as John McEnroe, George Takei and Bruce Vilanch.

But in the end, the movie feels as if it exists only to display the Sandler's biceps.

-- Stephen Hunter (June 6, 2008)

Contains sexual situations and crude language.