Hair Today, Falafels Tomorrow ...

Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Who better to manage the Muddled East than a man who mixes hummus with Hamas and comes up with mortar fire?

Yes, who else but ... Adam Sandler.

You were expecting maybe Henry Kissinger?

Well, someone should have doctored this script (the film opens Friday, June 6): "Don't Mess With the Zohan." Fair enough. It's a mess as it is.

As a crack krav maga Mossad agent who gets his scissor-kicks out of doing others people's hair, Zohan (Sandler) swipes Sinai for a salon, faking his own underwater death in Israel to become an underground sensation of a stylist in mad Manhattan.

Toss-up: Would you rather have the "Waterboy" doing your hair or "Big Daddy" diddling with foreign policy? Bad taste, political incorrigibility ... it's a wash.

Tonsorial anti-terrorist? Scud stud or shampoo shaman? That is Zohan's zany dilemma. For years, he's been cracking heads when he'd rather be washing them -- with maybe a henna tint. Combining an attraction to "chicks" and mashed chick peas, all he wants is a pita of the action of the New York salon world -- that's salon as in hair, not literary gathering, which probably would, legitimately, take umbrage at some of the unbecoming terms used in the script.

But then, maybe they'd misinterpret some of the script (co-written by Sandler and Robert Smigel), and think a fey gala is one in which the ballroom is destroyed and has nothing to do with Zohan's sissified -- hey, it's his parents in the film who react that way with squirm-inducing Yiddish epithets that epitomize stereotypes -- penchant for "do's" rather than dunes.

It's all a fractured mess with frat-boy humor that Phi Beta Geeks have learned to expect from Sandler, whose punch-drunk love for slap-shtick and raunchy riffs on breasts and jests remind one that there's a base out there for this base humor from millions of fans who have helped Sandler make millions.

And if there is a message in the mediocre movie -- other than wondering why this nearly two-hour on-screen appointment runs as long as it does -- it is that, yes, we can all get along. When Zohan falls for a Palestinian woman who runs the beauty shop at which he works in New York, one can almost see Quincy Jones checking his ego at the door for another rendition of "We Are The World."

Hair today, falafels tomorrow ... With its Mideast mix of Israeli and Arab actors, this West Side/West Bank story -- whose Tony is more attuned to Toni hair products -- is Sandler's sandal paean and attempted comical solution to a terrible situation that is not immune to smart humorous treatment. (See the Oscar-winning short "West Bank Story.")

Yes, Sandler seditiously elicits some belly-laughs that would have a swirling belly-dancer smiling -- the "Rocky" sand-dune send-up may have a Zohan monument replacing the Stallone statue at the Philadelphia Art Museum soon, to say nothing of its joke yoked to the image of Rocky swallowing his egg-yolk concoction and pounding sides of beef that would cowl even Adrian. But the end product is so childishly trashy that it would take a Camp David accord to decamp it all.

And speaking of end products ... Lainie Kazan, who portrays Zohan's hot mama of a lover/landlady, ends up revealing more than should be revealed in a scene shot from the back that will keep you backed up for weeks.

"Don't Mess with the Zohan"? It's too late. They've messed with me.

And I'm not happy about it at all!