CREDIT where credit's due: co-writers Adam Sandler and Knocked-Up's Judd Apatow put their combined box-office clout where their mouth is in this wilfully puerile Munich pastiche to take some amusing and fairly bruising pops at Mel Gibson for that not
orious anti-Semitic rant he delivered upon his arrest for drunk-driving in 2006. Having a white supremacist hate-monger list "Lethal Weapon 1, Lethal Weapon 2, Lethal Weapon 3 and What Women Want," as his favourite films is an inspired gag, so it's too bad the rest of the film can't really match it. Lazy gross-out humour and slap-dash direction (from Sandler regular Dennis Dugan) drains much of the momentum from an otherwise endearingly silly premise that has Sandler playing a preternaturally talented Israeli secret service agent who falls for a Palestinian woman (Emmanuelle Chriqui) after moving to New York to pursue his dream of becoming a hairdresser. The fraught nature of Arab-Israeli relations may sound like an odd backdrop for comedy, but ironically it proves a richer source of laughs than Sandler throwing himself around the screen like a demented Jerry Lewis. File this one under "missed opportunity".
The full article contains 221 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
