I WAS worried. Happy Gilmore 2 is red flag heaven, and no I’m not talking about the pin. A legacy sequel by a multimillionaire comedian decades after his run of boundary pushing lowbrow comedies? There was a very high percentage chance our collective Happy Place about the 1996 comedy masterpiece would become a Shooter McGavin nightmare. Like all comedy sequels this Happy Gilmore never threatens to surpass the original; however, it does find the Peace Place where everyone can chill, chuckle, and cheek smile, more often than not. You can count…on me, keeping it 100, with you in or outside the parking lot.
Using the 1996 opener as inspiration, we hard reset on a downtrodden Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler). He’s given up golf after losing wife Virginia Venit (Julie Bowen) to a tragic dive hook driving accident, which has left him alcoholic, downtrodden, working at a supermarket, as a single father of 6: 4 boys (Maxwell Jacob Friedman, Ethan Cutkosky, Philip Fine Schneider, Conor Sherry), 1 girl, Vienna (Sunny Sandler), and 1 homeless John Daly. Vienna is apparently good enough to go to ballet school in Paris, which would cost $300,000. To get that money quickly, happy goes back into the bag, literally, to make a late breaking comeback, hopefully before Maxi Golf Founder Frank Manatee (Benny Safdie) and longtime nemesis clinically insane Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald) destroy/corrupt the sport he loves.
For a legacy comedy sequel, there’s a fine line between inspiration and recreation. The Mean Girls remake was on the bad side of that line, recreating exact moments and lines, with none of the originality/bite of the OG movie, rendering those moments inevitably disappointing. Happy Gilmore 2 makes a lot of smart changes to make sure this one is something different but familiar. The best of those changes was essentially making Happy just a slightly exaggerated version of Adam Sandler today, not Adam Sandler 30 years ago. This means despite his circumstances, he’s more chill, and more of a family man, not a psychotic single maniac. Don’t worry, there’s still incredible physical comedy montages set to sneaky great pop songs (Sandman did always have excellent musical taste). But many of the iconic moments can now be either dispersed to other characters, or new wrinkles with new cast involved, like Happy breaking in another brand new caddy, Oscar Mejias (Bad Bunny) finding new jokes built around Oscar specifically. With a more mellowed out Happy, that means they flip the script and let Christopher McDonald take the unhinged psycho parts of the story. McDonald relishes this chance to let loose, taking a nothing side story and making it unnervingly fun, but not mean spirited like the first film was more inclined to do. The more mature Happy is ready to throw down with Shooter, but also ready to forgive and forget and try to let go, progress I guess, maybe thanks to Hal’s (Ben Stiller) group therapy sessions?
As you can tell, everyone was very excited to come back and be a part of Happy Gilmore 2. But not just the stars of the original: everyone and their grandmother tried to get onto this movie, from sports funny guys like Travis Kelce/John Daly, comedy vets like requisite SNL cast member Marcello Hernandez and Eric Andre, and to soon to be Oscar nominees like Margaret Qualley, ready and willing to put bodies on the laughter line for the Sandman. Also, the PGA embraced the film this time around. Like, really embraced it…in the form of decades worth of PGA starts ready for their movie moments in the sun. On paper, that’s the biggest red flag of them all: I mean, how many funny golfers do you guys know? But with Sandler running the ship, the guys all fall in line, meaning even devoid of personality, all of them are willing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of dignity for the sake of the best joke. I assumed these buttoned up pros, so careful with their words, would be scared to put themselves in compromising positions, but from the top down, everyone commits to the bit. Special props to Scottie Scheffler, who, if you know anything about him, delivered maybe the biggest laughs I had in a movie filled with comedy superstars. If you think I’ve given too much away here, I lost count at 287 cameos in this movie, who, for the most part, get some thing, big or little, to do in this movie. Vibes were so good in Happy Gilmore 2 I was even alright when Nick Swardson and Rob Schneider got their 30 seconds.
So congratulations Adam Sandler! You did a feat harder than making an Oscar winner; you made a comedy sequel pretty good! At least you know you can call the comedy phone whenever you want to recreate one of your classics if you need to. So what next? Do we dare try Billy Madison 2? Can you imagine Billy as a college professor merging the Water Boy backstory in there here and there, with a Big Daddy Jon Stewart cameo? OK that’s a disaster, but at least Happy Gilmore 2 wasn’t. RIP Carl Weathers; you would’ve gotten a stew going in this film for sure.