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THE HEBREW HAMMER Send This Review to a Friend
This action hero parody is such a feeble, sophomoric endeavor that too little is funny enough to make it worth watching even for a while. The premise is pure corn. Santa Claus is killed and his successor son is so mean-spirited and anti-Semitic that he wants to wipe out the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Enter the Hebrew Hammer, a nickname for a private eye on whose door is the sign "Certified Circumcised Dick," which will give you an idea of the humor that's hammered into the ground.
The film is the brainchild of writer-director Jonathan Kesselman, who has concocted one silly situation after another. The films starts with the tribulations of a Jewish boy, complete with his peyos (side curls), being subjected to anti-Semitic taunts at his school. Kesselman at least makes this funny, to the extent that anti-Semitism can ever be funny. But once the plot kicks in the film goes downhill rapidly.
Adam Goldberg plays the boy grown up, Mordechai Jefferson Carver, The Hammer, but he is without flair, rendering his presence simply boring. Esther (Judy Greer), the daughter of the head of the Jewish Justice League, enlists the detective to stop the plot against Hanukkah. The Hammer's mother (Nora Dunn) is a gross woman who keeps her cat in diapers that come off leaving their contents on Mrs. Carver's clothes and she is constantly talking about a nice Jewish girl for her son.
As the battle for Hanukkah escalates, and by inference the battle against anti-Semitism, The Hammer forms an alliance with the Kwananza Liberation Front, headed by Mario Van Peebles as Mohammed. The picture, drowning in accents, grows more stupid by the frame and while Kesselman must have thought it was a riot, the alleged comedy begins to limp along embarrassingly. One can spoof Jews, blacks and anyone else, but the operative guideline is the need to really be funny. A Strand Releasing release.
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