"Don't Mess With the Zohan" and "Hancock" share the goal of taking the glossy conventions of familiar genres - the fireball-laced action movie and its superhero variant, respectively - and treating them as a joke. The risk that both films incur is that the potential humor can easily be overwhelmed by the pyrotechnics and CGI illusions that are part of the package. It's hard to make an exploding truck or a crumbling skyscraper funny.

"Zohan" is based on a one-joke (OK, maybe two-joke) premise: A seemingly unstoppable Mossad commando (Adam Sandler) fakes his own death to pursue his dream of becoming a hair stylist in America. Such an illusion proves hard to maintain in the global village of New York, and the earnest hero finds himself embroiled in adventures against terrorists, evil real-estate developers and cameos by Paul Mitchell and Mariah Carey.

What's surprising about "Zohan" is how silly and innocent it all is. Dennis Dugan, who has directed Sandler in several earlier films, has a small gift for throwaway sight gags and a larger one for not letting performers such as Sandler and his regular cronies John Turturro and Rob Schneider get away with mugging or going for the obvious. As Sandler ages away from the stunted adolescents that marked his early films, he's had to work a little harder, but he's managed to avoid falling into the narcissistic vehicles that could almost be considered the inevitable career path of the aging "SNL" veteran. In spite of the big-and-loud action trappings that could have overwhelmed it (I don't think Sandler has a secret desire to make his own "Great Dictator," and that's a good thing), "Zohan" remains surprisingly likeable.

"Hancock" is something else altogether: ambitious, yes, but an uncontrollable and ultimately poorly planned mess. It's about a superhero, John Hancock (Will Smith), who's drunk and depressed, and tends to stop crimes only by turning them into larger disasters. He saves the life of an extremely kind-hearted publicist played by Jason Bateman (you can tell he's a squishy-hearted liberal because he has a Woodstock poster in his bedroom), who takes on the task of reforming the hero's bad image, getting him to sober up and make amends for his past mistakes, and eventually getting the city to welcome his participation in crime-stopping.

This is a curious film, rolling uncertainly from dark character exercise to violent action film, but it takes a disastrous shift in the final 40 minutes or so (if you haven't already read about it, I'll avoid spilling the secret), a misfired plot turn so ill conceived that it almost feels as though the filmmakers were making the whole thing up as they went along. Director Peter Berg (formerly an actor on TV's "Chicago Hope") continues his interest in oddly misplaced special effects but shows no real feel for characters or plot. The film lunges from one set-piece to another until if finally winds up on a limb far too perilous for even a more competent script to provide a rescue.

But "Zohan" and "Hancock" were hardly the only films this summer to push the excesses of action movies and special effects to goofy extremes. "Wanted," a ludicrous story of assassins and counter-assassins and counter-counter-assassins (or is it counter-assassin-assassins) shook visual cues from "Fight Club" and "The Matrix" in a blender and came out with ... an indigestible mess.

But this week the overblown, over-the-top "Tropic Thunder," directed by Ben Stiller, takes every kind of violent movie excess you can imagine and gets it very close to perfect. More on this later.

Coming up next: Do we really have to go into this? "Speed Racer"

Average user rating