Sony Pictures is having a great year financially. Adding it all up over at Box Office Mojo, I’d say the studio has made roughly about $390-million at the box office for their slate of relatively inexpensive releases so far this year, only 88 Minutes and The Other Boleyn Girl coming close to being anything I’d even remotely consider disappointments.

John Turturro, Adam Sandler and Emmanuelle Chriqui in Sony Pictures' You Don't Mess with the Zohan

Here’s the thing; in my opinion the best thing Sony has released this year is the anemically plotted (yet surprisingly popular) gambling melodrama 21. The rest of their slate? Including those two I’ve already mentioned above they’ve released godforsaken features like Vantage Point, Prom Night, First Sunday and the absolutely putrid Diane Lane thriller Untraceable.

I bring all this up because the studio’s latest release is the Adam Sandler pic You Don’t Mess with the Zohan and it is, without question, the worst flick out of the whole freakishly abysmal bunch. More, this thing might just be the most disgustingly unforgivable entry in the actor’s shockingly successful yet monstrously terrible career. Worse than Little Nicky, more painful to sit through then Big Daddy, Click or Mr. Deeds, this sophomoric and tasteless take on Israeli-Palestine relations nearly beats Deck the Halls as the single most unwatchable and utterly irredeemable comedy I’ve ever had the displeasure to review.

But what makes all of this so depressing is the fact audiences probably won’t care. I mean, it’s not like they didn’t make the actor’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry a smash hit just last Summer, and more likely than not they’ll do exactly the same thing this year as well. Sandler fans will seemingly follow the guy just about anywhere if the movie is designed to make them laugh (which sort of explains how the magnificent Reign Over Me could be so unjustly ignored), and even if I can’t quite understand it myself the truth is as clear as George Washington’s face on the dollar bill.

The end result is that audiences are gong to continue to be their own worst enemies and Hollywood studios like Sony are going to keep getting the opportunity to reap the whirlwind of their incompetence. When films like these make more then enough money at the turnstile to offset their costs ultimately we're the only ones we can blame for spending the dough for a ticket in the first place.  

Granted, that doesn’t make watching stuff like You Don’t Mess with the Zohan any easier. A bad movie is a bad movie and I really don’t care for the reasons behind its ultimate creation. All I care about is that it stinks, and in the case of this Sandler monstrosity the scent it manufactures is so malodorous three skunks, five rotten eggs and a whole landfill composed of rotting feces would smell like a rose garden in comparison.

Film Rating: 1/2ê  (out of 4) 

Additional Links:

- You Don't Mess with the Zohan Theatrical Trailer