Now in his 40s, Adam Sandler is in a deep, widely acknowledged creative funk (correspondingly, he’s gotten meatier and logier-looking, as if he’s been on the same diet and weightlifting regime for too long). Last year’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry wasn’t as execrable as fearful liberals said it was (the Alexander Payne–Jim Taylor–Barry Fanaro script actually had many bright moments), but Sandler’s performance was distinctly turgid. With You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Sandler returns to co-writing after a hiatus (his last effort was in 2002’s animated Eight Crazy Nights, and before that 2000’s Little Nicky), and he is in poor shape. Zohan regurgitates the conceits of his ’90s comedies, complementing them with a distastefully simple-minded take on contemporary ethnic politics.

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Sex and the City used to be a good show—a fact that faded further from view during its last few seasons, and of which the movie version seems terrified to remind us too often. This goodness was not rocket science. People liked the show’s four strong female leads, their unblushing attitudes toward sex, and especially the way they talked with each other: an assortment of bons mots, ribald neologisms and frank, sisterly advice. Sex and the City was always a fantasy, but its characters had authenticity. They wanted irrational things; were driven to absurd, humiliating lengths in pursuit of them; and were usually made to face, in the series’s perpetual moral, some form of compromise.

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It takes Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) approximately 10 minutes to escape from Guantanamo Bay, during which time they meet real terrorists in the cell beside them and fend off advances from a big, fat guard looking for a blowjob (known to Gitmo inmates as a “cockmeat sandwich”). After that, they flee with some Cuban refugees to Florida, and it’s back to the picaresque journey that defined their first film: this time, instead of White Castle, they head toward the Texas wedding of Kumar’s ex, who is marrying a “douche” with political connections that might help to acquit them.

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Any one of us could write a treatment for a new Will Ferrell movie: set it in the ’70s or early ’80s, give him a daggy haircut and duds, make him a big fish in a small pond who gets his comeuppance but triumphs anyway, throw in Andy Richter and some scantily clad babes (definitely an animal attack), and there you go.

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