Happy Gilmore 2 Review
Happy Has Grown Up after 30 years
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN Spoilers from Happy Gilmore 2 and the 1996 film, Happy Gilmore. There may be discussions of violence, adult language, and suggestive depiction. CONSIDER WHEN AND WHERE IT WOULD BE APPROPRIATE TO READ THIS PIECE.Catching Up With Happy
Before I dig into this film, I just want to disclaim that I was most definitely alive and kicking the first time around that Happy Gilmore revolutionized golf. In fact, as an 80’s kid, I was exactly in the right age range to adore the hit after hit after hit that Adam Sandler produced in the 1990’s. From Waterboy to Mr. Deeds, his comedy formats did not miss with me when I was a kid. It’s been roughly 30 years since the golden age of Sandler, and while the man has consistently evolved with time like his work on Spaceman, his bread and butter will always be with his dumb comedy scripts. Did Adam Sandler recapture the magic that made Happy Gilmore a cultural icon or is Happy Gilmore 2 a simple nostalgia trap? I think the real answer lies somewhere in between.
Happy Gilmore returns to golf nearly 30 years later
Like a lot of other sequels that were produced more than a decade later, Happy Gilmore 2 takes place in the same year as its production release. With the original film set and released in 1996, this sequel occurs nearly 30 years later. The titular character Happy has gone through a lot of maturity since the end of the first film. Right off of the club, we catch up with the anti-hero through a montage of the years directly succeeding his first tour win in the final minutes of the first film. Happy is happily married to Virginia Venit and has produced 5 children with her while also completing 4 more tour championships since 1996. His run of success comes to a tragic end with the accidental death of his wife which is a direct homage to another tragic lesson Happy learned in the beginning of the first film.
This traumatizing inciting incident starts a trend of alcohol abuse and violence that drives the once former golf hero to rock bottom. More than a decade later, the has-been is now working at a grocery store stocking shelves until his youngest daughter’s fleeting dream of being a dancer is in danger due to his lack of funds to send her to school in Europe. This kicks Gilmore into gear once more as he follows a similar arc to use golf as a means for income in order to pay for something important for his family. From a screenplay standpoint, I’m very impressed with how similar the storyline plot points are in the two films while still maintaining a sense of uniqueness with the sequel. It’s the ultimate nostalgia trip. We as viewers are basically living through the same exact story we adored in 1996, but now just with a slight tweak and modernization to the concept. It’s extremely difficult to craft a second story with the same backbone of the first without making it tedious and repetitive. Just from a concept standpoint, I think Happy Gilmore 2 did a terrific job.
Lots of Familiar Faces
Where my sentiments end is with the countless celebrity cameos and callbacks to the original film. When you’re watching Gilmore 2, you quickly realize that they designed this movie to play as a tribute to the 90’s classic. The film uses actual film flashbacks from the original a multitude of times to help remind the viewer what the visual representation was for the gag they’re essentially reenacting in the current narrative. They even go as far as to run an updated, or should I say upheaval of the Happy Place zone by freeze-framing a young and provocative Virginia Venit and replacing her with new happy thoughts from Happy’s current life that is more “age-appropriate”. There are so many callbacks to classic moments of the iconic first film that I can spend an entire article listing them. All you need to know is that it’s just not as funny the second time around.
In my head I can pull up classic Adam Sandler moments from so many of his hit movies without giving it too much thought. The comedic scenarios and the ruffian dialogue featured in his 90’s movies are one of a kind. I can’t honestly say I’ll remember any scene from this film. When a majority of a film is dedicated to homaging another film, there isn’t too much time to create new original memories that don’t tie in with the older film.
A more age-appropriate Happy Place
The other aspect of why it was harder for Gilmore 2 to connect with me has more to do with the times. In today’s more politically correct culture, it’s much more difficult to allow a degenerate character like Happy Gilmore to fully embrace in acts of humor that pushes boundaries of routine comedy acts. Punching Bob Barker in the face and getting an ass whooping the first time around is something that was unexpected and provocative at the time. You wouldn’t have ever envisioned a scene about Happy getting physical with the white-haired game show host going into the theater.
We don’t really get those special unexpected moments in the sequel. Instead what we do get are the recycled classic lines in slightly altered new environments. For example this time around, Happy gets into a fist fight at the cemetery with his arch-nemesis Shooter McGavin. There are a few tasteful tributes in the form of gravestones to actors in the first film who are no longer alive, but the scene just doesn’t have the same punch (no pun intended) as the shtick did the first time. While it was fun to relive those iconic punchlines, they quickly lose their substance as the story moves on to the next one. It feels like a concert for a 90’s band playing through their classic hits with a slight remix to the track. Your sense of nostalgia is triggered and you may enjoy it, but it isn’t really a long awaited new single. That’s exactly what it feels like watching Happy Gilmore 2.
The takeaway I got from this film is that Adam Sandler the actor is a genuine guy with a lot of friends and family that he loves. It must be a near record for the sheer amount of celebrities and actors that made cameos in Gilmore 2. It probably doesn’t usurp Bollywood hits like Om Shanti Om, but it was somewhat fun to watch and anticipate who might show up on screen next. Sandler even cast his wife and two daughters into prominent roles that were some of the better original scenes in the script. Adam Sandler has always been at his best when his dumb humor intersects with a family-based resolve. His characters are deeply flawed, but when push comes to shove, they learn and become better people for the ones he loves. That’s what makes Adam Sandler films so lovable. From Grandma’s house to his children’s careers, the selfish Happy Gilmore would rather put them and their happiness first. That’s his major redeeming quality. You can see this transpire over to the production aspect of filmmaking too. It didn’t matter how minute their role was in the original film, if the actor was still alive during filming, they likely had a part in this sequel. Adam Sandler treats people like family and that does come through in his movies.
Just how many times have we seen Steve Buscemi, and Rob Schneider pop up for a couple of lines throughout the years? Robert Smigel was on screen as an IRS agent in the first film for barely a few minutes, and his tiny role returns with a career change in Gilmore 2. The production team also threw in a tribute to Sandler’s late co-star from Grown Ups, Cameron Boyce into the film. In many ways, Happy Gilmore 2 feels like an inside Hollywood gathering and you as a viewer feel like you’re in the know to.
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Other than that, there isn’t much substance in the film that differentiates itself. The only original piece from the sequel that I found quite amusing and unexpected was the reveal that the rival Maxi League golfers had hip alterations to be able to drive a golf ball over 500 yards. Happy Gilmore 2 took the craziness to an unrealistic angle and I was slightly conflicted over whether I liked it or not.
Look, it’s not out of the realm of belief to imagine a wannabe hockey player transitioning into an unorthodox pro golfer. The original film was outlandish, but the outlandishness was still grounded in our reality. An alligator could have bitten off a golfer’s hand. A loudmouth asshole’s fantasy place could be a perverted golf course featuring his love interest in lingerie next to his grandmother. They’re all over the top scenarios, but they could technically happen.
However, a secret lab of golfers with their ilolumbar ligament severed to become monster golfers likely will never happen on our timeline. And as cool as the Maxi League golf course was, I still have no idea what they were playing and what the rules were. That was likely the point. The rules change as they go and no one really knows how the game is played. That also took me out of the story and my rooting interest for Happy and his team of PGA golfers. In the climatic scene of the first film, they were just playing golf. It just happened that a camera tower collapsed onto the green where he would need to sink an insane trick shot through the newly formed obstacle course to win the tournament and the winnings.
In Gilmore 2, the final hole was a remote controlled spinning, and tilting green that required Gilmore and his caddy Oscar (played by Bad Bunny) to be perfectly balanced. The stakes and the satisfaction of overcoming the odds in their respective scenarios just don’t feel the same. It’s as if Happy was transported into a weird fantasy world for the end of the sequel. The tone of the last act just didn’t match with the otherwise sombering and very real imagery of dealing with loss and addiction showcased in the first two acts.
Growing With The Times
While it was fun at times to catch up with characters and scenarios I loved since 1996, Happy Gilmore 2 isn’t a film I see myself throwing up on my television annually to revisit like I do with the library of golden age Sandler flicks. It’s worth a Friday night viewing at the least and it's very savvy business for Netflix to distribute as it gives them twice the stream revenue since viewers will likely revisit the original on their platform before or after watching this new film to refresh their memories.
A part of me was expecting this movie to be a big letdown and I’m at least happy that it was far from that. The odd thing is that Happy Gilmore has grown up and matured so much in 30 years that I just don’t like what I saw. Maybe that’s a reflection of my own life trajectory. The silly antics, the all's well that ends well mentality I adored from the first film, it’s all a symbol of my own youth from 1996. The 2025 version of me is battered and bruised from living life over the last thirty years and seeing that original happy place in Happy Gilmore continue and evolve and learn to move on through tragedy hits too close to home. Maybe that’s the ultimate takeaway from Happy Gilmore 2. A happy place won’t always stay the same, but you always have to find something to live for.
Alex
Caught in between the conundrum of his fascination with retro and the future, Alex has a very unique taste in technology. Never one to follow trends like his millennial peers yet constantly desiring to get ahead of the curve, he sees technology like he does his other love: comic books. Always looking for the best value or a hidden gem, his collector mindset reflects on some of his favorite gadgets: the Moto X (2015), HTC U11 and the Google Pixelbook. If there’s a good tech deal out there, Alex is on the hunt!