Adam Sandler's new groan-fest strictly a predictable affair

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Who would ever have thought an Adam Sandler movie could have anything in common with "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"? It's strange but true, as seen in "You Don't Mess With the Zohan."Consider: Sandler plays Israel's best counterterrorism agent, mega-libidinous Zohan, who wants to retire his guns and pick up scissors to fulfill his dream of becoming a hairstylist. With his love of disco and devotion to the 1987 Paul Mitchell style book, Zohan is undeniably in a "Time Warp."After Zohan fakes his death and finally gets a chance to prove himself at a rundown New York salon, he becomes popular less for his dated coifs than for his "pelvic thrusts," which really drive his middle-aged and elderly customers insane. He's so seductive, a la "Sweet Transvestite," that you can practically hear the salon patrons sing "Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me."Zohan's superhuman strength, flexibility and speed look like something Dr. Frank-N-Furter cooked up in his lab while "I Can Make You a Man" played in the background, and his journey echoes the mantra of "Don't Dream It" -- "don't dream it, be it."Sandler's core audience of mild to extreme homophobic males won't acknowledge -- or even recognize -- the allusions, but taking note of them helps to pass the time when the film's broad humor runs out of steam, as it occasionally does. Despite its admirable secondary goal of showing that the Israelis and Palestinians sharing the streets of New York are able to live in peace, "Zohan" is strictly a predictable affair, with a steady flow of raunchy, off-color humor and more bare behinds than most viewers will care to see.Sandler redeems himself from the painful "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" with a different kind of groan-fest -- you may hate yourself, but you have to laugh. In perhaps his sexiest guise since "Airheads" (he spent four months training with a Navy SEAL to get in shape), he spreads sweet, lustful and brotherly love along with the joys of "silky smooth" hair.Co-stars including John Turturro, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Nick Swardson, Lainie Kazan, Ido Moseri, Rob Schneider, Charlotte Rae, Daoud Heidami and Alec Mapa join Sandler on his wavelength. A weird assortment of cameos gets a bit distracting.Directed by Dennis Dugan and scripted by Judd Apatow, Robert Smigel and Sandler, "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" feels like a blast from Sandler's "Saturday Night Live" sketch-comedy past. It's silly enough to provoke spit-take laughs, but it ultimately exposes its weaknesses by going on too long.Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language and nudity.Three stars (out of five).(Contact Knoxville News Sentinel film critic Betsy Pickle at pickle(at)knews.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)