Happy Gilmore is one of those comedies from the 1990s that I loved as a kid and still do now. It didn’t have high-brow comedy, as that’s never been Adam Sandler’s style, but it worked like Caddyshack did at hilariously bringing an outsider underdog into a prestigious and pompous sport. While many like myself would argue that Sandler’s comedic quality has dropped in the past few decades, his comedies in the ‘90s still hold up more due to the cleverness of the writing and the comedic timing of the jokes. Somewhere along the way, Sandler and his crew of writers stopped trying as hard to be clever with their humor and focused more on the low-hanging fruit jokes that would essentially make a movie and pay the bills, while giving Sandler and his friends the chance to travel to a location to shoot the movie. As a result, his movies have come to rely more on the sentimental notes of his storytelling and cameos from other famous people to keep audiences interested. Nothing could be more indicative of this than his recent sequel to Happy Gilmore, produced by Netflix.

Pros

Comedy is what you expect from an Adam Sandler movie these days, if that’s your thing
Christopher McDonald brings the charisma to keep things interesting
Main motivations of Happy are noble

Cons

Unfunny garbage reliant on nostalgia and cameos to keep you entertained
Two storylines slammed together to make a stupid plot
Methods of making Happy an underdog again are lazy and cheap
Callbacks to the first film only make the sequel look worse, figuratively and literally
Unceremonious exposition dumps

Plot & Thoughts

After becoming a golf champion at the end of the previous film, Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler) saw continued success in the sport of golf. He married Virginia (Julie Bowen) and had a brood of children with her. He made tons of money doing commercials and sponsorships to pay for his family’s expenses, and everything was going well. Then, he hit a golf ball at a tournament that struck and killed Virginia, leaving behind Happy and their children. The death of Virginia crushed Happy’s spirits, and he crawled his way into a bottle of alcohol as he neglected to pay his taxes and, essentially, lost everything.

He continued to raise his kids to adulthood in a dumpy neighborhood on his low-paying jobs, while drinking away his sorrows. Despite being financially desperate, his children still support and love him for who he is, but his daughter has aspirations of becoming a dancer. Determined to get the $300,000 required to send her to the most renowned dance school the movie could conjure up, he starts training for golf tournaments again. His alcoholism gets in the way, however, and he needs to get back on the wagon if he wants a shot at winning any tournaments. Also, there’s a new competing golf organization that is on the rise called MaxiGolf. They are trying to make the sport more interesting for modern audiences with goofy obstacles and extremely long drives to the fairway. At some point, Happy gets involved with this nonsense too and has to team up with professional golfers and old rivals to take down MaxiGolf.

Despite, or perhaps due to my enjoyment of the original film, I did not ask for or want a sequel to Happy Gilmore. It was fine as Sandler’s best film in his portfolio of trash, a shining diamond in the rough. Alas, thirty years later, and we get this abomination. I know people who like Happy Gilmore 2, and I have listened to podcasts defend this movie, but I hate it. I could not muster a single laugh for this piece of crap. I hated pretty much every minute of it aside from the opening two minutes, before Victoria is killed off and Happy falls from grace, just like every other male protagonist in beloved movie franchises that predate 2010.

Just as Indiana Jones became a depressed alcoholic who wanted to die because his wife left him and his son was killed in Vietnam in The Dial of Destiny, Happy Gilmore has to fall into the hole of despair. He has to kill his wife, lose everything, and get addicted to alcohol just so he can become an underdog again. What a shallow and lazy method of giving Happy a challenge that also manages to diminish his character at the same time. Do you know what could have made him an underdog in your story about competing golf franchises that didn’t kill his wife and ruin his life? You could have just had him get injured in an accident, playing hockey or something dangerous, which then prevents him from being able to swing the golf club as well as he used to. He starts losing tournaments and is not getting sponsorships anymore. You can still have the plot device of the daughter wanting to be a dancer—you can even give the sons a chance at doing something meaningful in the movie rather than being braindead meatheads—as motivation for Happy to succeed. Maybe he’s forced to learn how to play the game like everyone else does and not the way he did before, and in the end, he finds a new swing that works for him. I merely suggest this alternative backstory because I am so sick and tired of modern sequels dragging characters down just for the sake of their crap story.

Speaking of crap stories, Happy Gilmore 2 has two of them. It has Happy trying to overcome his alcoholism and regain his abilities. It also has the MaxiGolf plot involving the young new athletes who can swing the ball as hard as Happy can, and bizarre golf courses filled with hazards and nonsense. The former is certainly more endearing than the latter, as Happy’s kids try to help him through his addiction, and it’s at least nice to see a father loved by his children, despite his flaws; it’s almost impressive that they didn’t make the kids leave him, too. The MaxiGolf plot, meanwhile, just feels like a ripoff of Dodgeball. It also just doesn’t work because I remember the XFL and how that was supposed to change the way American football was played, yet nobody watched it. As a fan of baseball who has an axe to grind about all the rule changes the MLB has made in the past few years to “make the game more exciting” and garner countless new fans—which it hasn’t—I simply do not believe that turning golf into an American Gladiators type of show would become more popular to watch than the original sport.

Regardless of which story is more meaningful, they both are filled with cameos and jokes that miss the mark. Many of the jokes are reused from the first film, but since that movie was from 30 years ago, the filmmakers must have been worried people watching Happy Gilmore 2 on Netflix wouldn’t get the jokes, because clips from the first film are frequently inserted into the scene to give context. Not only do these clips bother me because they feel like an overt memberberry every time, but they also showcase how much better the original film looked. Now that many movies are shot using camera phones, they look very different from the film cameras of the ‘90s. Likewise, Netflix does not necessarily gather the best cinematographers for their movies. Every time it cut back to the original movie, it was an annoying, abrupt shock to the visuals because of how different the two look from each other.

Does Happy Gilmore 2 have any positives? Aside from the noble intentions of Happy and the portrayal of a loving and supportive family trying to help their alcoholic father, I liked Christopher McDonald’s return as Shooter McGavin. His character was one of the best aspects of the original film, and his return gives him something of a redemption arc. I still didn’t laugh at any of the jokes, but he brought a smile to my face with his enthusiasm and eccentricity in the role. Of all the various cameos or returning characters, his was the one that worked the best. The rest of them were either to just let a random famous person come in and out of the scene, or it was another nostalgic key jangle to refer back to a previous character. Some characters couldn’t return, obviously, because in 30 years, many of the actors who played these referenced characters have passed away. While certain characters, like Chubbs (Carl Weathers), were integral to the original story and should be referenced, did we need Eminem to play the son of the guy who said “Jackass” in a single scene to then be immediately eaten by alligators? It certainly didn’t make me laugh.

TL;DR

Like many other comedies before it that have attempted to do a sequel many years after the release of the first (i.e., Anchorman 2, Zoolander 2, Super Troopers 2), Happy Gilmore 2 fails to even stand in the shadow of the original. It’s an unfunny waste of time that tries to cover up its laziness with countless cameos and references. It’s an utter failure on all levels, and someone needs to stop Sandler from giving his other comedies from the ‘90s the same treatment, because Billy Madison is next, and he likely won’t stop until we get Little Nicky 2, which I don’t think anyone wants.