You Don't Mess With The Zohan (2 1/2 stars)
Directed by Dennis Dugan. Written by Adam Sandler, Robert Smigel, and Judd Apatow. With Adam Sandler, John Turturro, and Emmanuelle Chriqui. (R)
You Don't Mess With The Zohan is gross-out comedy with a message. Featuring an Israeli counter-terrorist turned New York hairdresser who falls for the sister of a famous Palestinian terrorist, the message—essentially "Can't we all just get along?"—is a sweetly hopeful if wildly simplistic response to the conflict. It could have made for an oddly touching film—sort of a funnier, more wish-fulfilling Do The Right Thing—but whatever good intentions Sandler and cowriters Robert Smigel (aka Triumph The Insult Comic Dog) and Judd Apatow (Superbad) had lie smothered beneath a warm, moist pile of men's bikini briefs.
Sandler stars as Zohan (or "The Zohan" in the Borat-like inflected English of many of the characters), a one-man wrecking crew and Israel's most beloved military man. In the words of his father, he's "Rembrandt with a grenade," but he's grown tired of the endless fighting. Desperate to live out his dream of working as a hairdresser for Paul Mitchell, he fakes his own death during a mano-a-mano confrontation with super-terrorist The Phantom (John Turturro) and stows away on a plane to New York.
Once there, he finds work at a salon run by Palestinian beauty Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui) where he builds an enthusiastic clientele of older women eager for his services—specifically, the athletic sex that follows a dye job. There really isn't any reason for Zohan to be such a vigorously sexual animal, except that it gives Sandler an excuse to bump and grind to the disco music montages that pop up with depressing regularity. It's a degrading affair, especially when his costars in the scenes are elderly actresses being sprayed with the faux ejaculate of a water jet.
His past catches up with him when a cabbie (Rob Schneider) recognizes the supposedly dead Zohan and gets on the horn with the Hezbollah Hotline. Soon enough, The Phantom is on his way to New York with Zohan in his sights. That their final confrontation takes place at a Hacky Sack tournament is less odd than the spray of cameos that accompany it: Mariah Carey sings the national anthem, John McEnroe strips off his shirt, George Takei hosts a party for gay men, Henry Winkler (The Fonz) vomits, and musician Dave Matthews appears as a white supremacist bomber who threatens to blow up a cage of Beagle puppies. Those surprise appearances at least share the impact of cognitive dissonance—is that who I think it is? And if so, what the hell are they doing here? Much less effective are Sandler's old Saturday Night Live cronies; Kevin Nealon is bland as a cowardly community watch guard, and Chris Rock appears for a minute as a cab driver cracking jokes about genocide. Against all odds, the usually annoying Schneider is actually effective as Salim, if you can accept the brownface makeup his role requires.
Zohan certainly has its share of laughs, particularly on either side of its sagging middle, and especially in its send-ups of commando movies and other ultra-masculine stories (Turturro has a good bit when The Phantom trains Rocky-style for his upcoming showdown with The Zohan). Without the bloat and sexual bombast, it could have been a lean, wry look at our preconceived ideas about national identity and masculinity. As it is, it's a pumped-up sex comedy that wishes it were something more.
Kung Fu Panda (3 1/2 stars)
Directed by Mark Osborne and John Stevenson. Written by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, based on a story by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris. With Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, and Lucy Liu. (PG)
Kung Fu Panda, a film whose title does it no favors, looks at first glance to be another in the long line of animated films whose shelf life doesn't extend far beyond opening weekend. Instead, it proves to be a surprisingly good movie, with the timeless feel of a classic children's story.
Credit the filmmakers, who knew from the start that they didn't want to travel the well-worn road forged by the likes of Shrek. Interviewed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, co-director John Stevenson—who himself worked on the Shrek films—made the distinction clear: "We defined this as a film that was not going to have contemporary jokes in it, was not going to be self-aware, was going to take itself seriously although it was a comedy." Further, they had a clear idea about the usual raft of honeyed pap that makes up the scores of today's animated films: "We knew we didn't want any pop songs. We wanted an orchestral, timeless epic movie score."
If it was an uphill battle to get the film made, it was worth it. Always engaging and frequently nothing short of beautiful, the film tells the story of Po, a panda who dreams of greatness—or at least, in the words of Jack Black, who gives voice to Po, "awesomeness." Stuck working in his father's noodle shop, Po plasters his walls with posters of the Furious Five, the kung fu masters he reveres.
When kung fu master Oogway—an ancient tortoise—names Po the Dragon Warrior, the disbelieving panda finds himself living and training with his heroes under their master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman). The team is preparing for the coming attack of escaped prisoner Tai Lung, a vicious snow leopard whom Shifu once considered a son, before he turned to evil.
Voiced by Ian McShane (Deadwood, Sexy Beast), Tai Lung is a growling menace. His prison escape is a highlight, showcasing the incredible art of the animators. The prison itself, worthy of Escher, is a multilevel labyrinth whose deep purple shadows and cavernous depths are broken only by the warm orange of lanterns and torchlight. While the rest of the film is beautiful in its own right, it's in the darkest scenes—inside the prison and during a few night scenes—that the film achieves its richest hues. In those moments, it goes beyond being an amazingly well animated film to become something entrancing and even beautiful.
The voice cast is uniformly above par as well, especially Black, Hoffman, and McShane. Black does particularly well, perhaps because he's not able to give in to his penchant for using physical comedy as a shortcut to performance. As the daydreaming Po, Black seems to channel the best parts of youthful hope; when he reverently rattles off a long list of details taken from kung fu history, you get the feeling Black may well have been that teenager with the homemade nunchucks and a stack of dog-eared copies of Black Belt stashed under his bed.
Son of Rambow (3 stars)
Written and directed by Garth Jennings. With Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Jules Sitruk, and Jessica Stevenson. (PG-13)
The boundless creativity of children is a marvelous thing. In their hands, a cardboard box might become a pirate ship or intergalactic cruiser ready to carry them on an afternoon adventure without ever leaving the back yard. Even then, the box is just a bonus; the real action is what's going on in their heads. When I was a (pre-Nintendo) kid, the big game going in the neighborhood was something we called Anybody: everyone would pick a character, and we would go through our day as though that's who we were. When you've got a cast that might include Spider Man, Captain Hook, and a monkey, the stories pretty much write themselves.
In Son of Rambow that sense of wide-open possibility is embraced on a grand scale—at times perhaps a little too grand, but always with a warmth that makes it easy to forgive the film's occasional overreaching. Writer/director Garth Jennings' (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) paean to the power of the imagination is not only a story of escape, but also one of religious strife, broken homes, and redemption.
Bill Milner stars as Will Proudfoot, a boy whose Plymouth Brethren family has done its best to shield "Brother William" from the world at large. There's no television, no movies, and when Will's mother overhears him humming a modern tune, she tells him a story from her own childhood; captivated by a popular song, she bought a record player to bring music into the home. Her parents burned it. "I know it's hard," she says, but the early death of Will's dad makes the family dependent on the good will of the Brethren.
Lee Carter, on the other hand, is a holy terror, a budding con artist and bully who pauses on his run home to knock a neighbor off a ladder. When we first meet him he's hunched down in the local movie theater with a camcorder trained on the screen, making an illicit copy of First Blood—the first in the series of Rambo films.
When Will and Lee are thrown together after a mishap at school, watching that bootlegged film has the impact of an atomic bomb, and Will's life is forever changed. The colorful doodles he's filled his books with are suddenly awash in grappling hooks and bandoliers, and he reimagines the Rambo story as one of a boy coming to rescue his lost father. Once Lee tells Will about his plan for a homemade recreation of the film, a wide-eyed Will signs on to play the title role.
At first it's a clandestine affair, but word of the filming leaks out at their school, and soon everyone wants a role, especially French exchange student Didier. A ludicrously over the top '80s-era peacock, Didier is an androgynous exotic flower to the English students. His enthusiasm makes stars of Will and Lee—much to Lee's consternation. As his once total control of the film is slowly taken away, egos clash and bruise, and what should be their film's triumph instead lands Lee in the hospital.
Son of Rambow is best in its smaller moments, when it concentrates on the friendship at its core. Milner gives a wonderful performance as the sheltered boy given the chance to drink in life (literally, in a Coke-and-Pop Rocks moment), and Poulter is good in the more one-dimensional role of Lee. The film falters when it strives to paint a bigger picture, and the subplot involving Didier's cult of personality quickly moves from knowing reference to hackneyed regurgitation of tropes long past their expiration date. Those tropes are punctured by a great twist late in the film, but it's not enough to make them enjoyable while they're onscreen. Similarly, the fairy-tale ending seems a bit too pat, but the road there is enjoyable enough—and bumpy enough—to keep it from being cloying.
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