In most rankings of Adam Sandler’s prolific filmography, 1996’s Happy Gilmore comes near the top of the leaderboard: tour calibre, as a golfer might put it, a scratch among bogeys. It arrived at the peak of the Sandman’s career, in his 1990s pomp, only a year after leaving Saturday Night Live, and remains much loved for many comedy fans of a certain age. Co-written by Sandler and his old college roommate Tim Herlihy, it was a goofy sports movie which made the most of Sandler’s everyman comedic talents, as a wannabe hockey player whose amiable personality and occasional bouts of rage blew the dust off golf with a 400-yard drive.
And now Happy is back, in the first sequel Sandler has made for any of his heyday characters, again written by Sandler and Herlihy. A speedy montage catches us up on the intervening years: after winning the tour championship at the end of the first film, Happy has become a golfing megastar, married his sweetheart Virginia (Julie Bowen), had a family, and, like the real Sandler, “hosted Saturday Night Live a few times”. But when a freak golfing tragedy hits the Gilmore family, Happy retires from the sport and falls on hard times, becoming an alcoholic who hides booze in pepper-grinders. It’s only when his daughter decides she needs to go to a (conveniently expensive) ballet school that Happy finally decides to pick up his golf club again.
As is now tradition in late-era Sandler, this is more of a family affair than the original: Sandler hires his real-life daughter Sunny to play his fictional daughter Vienna, and his other daughter Sadie, wife Jackie and mother Judy pop up in supporting roles. Happy also has his own brood, Vienna and four teenage (or at least teenage-coded) sons, “whose hockey instincts were too strong” for golf — and if Happy himself has mellowed over the years, this lot vicariously act as his raging, juvenile id: they fight, they swear, they moon, they use various phallic implements to simulate penises.
Sandler’s commitment to amiable stupidity remains powerfully difficult to dislike.
Those who don’t vibe with the Sandman’s singular élan might find the road hard going — acclaimed thespian Steve Buscemi pisses into a mailbox in the first ten minutes, providing a good example of the tone of the piece — but once we get into the swing of things, it will feel comfortingly familiar to Happy-heads. As in the first film, our hero must win a tournament with a cash prize to help a family member, and like the original, he must go up against a cartoonish rotter. With Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald) now institutionalised with poisonous bitterness, primary bad-guy duties fall to Sandler’s Uncut Gems co-director Benny Safdie as the chin-bearded billionaire bastard Frank Manatee, who wants to transform the game of golf into obnoxious gimmicks, with a studiously silly biohacking conspiracy thrown into the mix.
Unlike the first film, which could only manage a couple of sporting cameos, this sequel is absolutely littered with real-life golfing pros, too, from old-school legends like Jack Nicklaus to modern titans like Rory McIlroy. PGA champ John Daly is even an effective member of the Gilmore family, living in the garage and drinking hand sanitiser, for reasons too dumb to get into. Also present are the usual Sandler repertory players, a gurning Ben Stiller, and a few more head-scratching cameos besides (Bad Bunny? Irish wrestler Becky Lynch? Taylor Swift’s boyfriend?).
The sheer size of the guest list, returning and new, may be the reason why the film is a good half an hour longer than it needs to be. Like any Adam Sandler comedy film made this century, Happy Gilmore 2 never ascends higher than ‘hit-and-miss’, and there are some long stretches spent in the rough you must put up with. But there’s something very sweet about the connections it makes with the original film that director Kyle Newacheck frequently dips into, and Sandler’s commitment to amiable stupidity remains powerfully difficult to dislike. This is a film where millionaire rapper Eminem gets eaten by alligators in a pond, to the delight of the watching crowd, while veteran real-life golf commentator Verne Lundquist notes cheerfully, “Well, looks like we have our first fatality.” If that’s not going to make you at least raise a smile, you’ll never be Happy.
