Happy Gilmore 2, the belated Netflix sequel to the Adam Sandler comedy classic, has sparked outrage among fans due to its very shocking opening sequence.
Released in 1996, the original Happy Gilmore revolved around a failed ice hockey player who reinvents himself as a golf pro to raise money for his grandmother. While ascending the ranks of golf, Sandler’s Happy falls in love with a public relations expert named Virginia (played by future Modern Family star Julie Bowen).
*Spoilers follow*
While audiences were expecting more of the same comedy from the new sequel, many were thrown off by the darkness of the film’s first few minutes. It sees Happy accidentally kill Virginia in a freak golf accident, leaving him to take care of their five children.
“What they did to the GOAT Virginia Venit in Happy Gilmore 2 was almost a fatal flaw in the movie,” one person tweeted on X/Twitter. “Needed much more Julie Bowen.”
Another person wrote that the film was “off to a terrible start” due to Virginia’s death, something echoed by a third viewer: “Happy Gilmore kills Virginia in the first three minutes of the movie. And we’re just supposed to let that go and move on to a boring story that’s not funny. What a flick!”
“Extremely disappointed with the decision to kill Virginia off,” tweeted another Happy Gilmore fan. “Their dynamic could have made this movie.”
Another person criticised the film for its overall use of Virginia, as she reappears in several scenes throughout the sequel as a ghostly apparition.
“This movie suffered from the get go by [killing] Virginia, just an all around dumb starting off point considering she kept popping up anyway.”
Julie Bowen and Adam Sandler in ‘Happy Gilmore 2’ (Scott Yamano/Netflix)
Despite the backlash, the film’s director Kyle Newacheck has defended the decision to kill off the character.
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“There’s always a concern when you’re playing with that type of darkness,” he told Slash Film. “But I don’t know, I was never really concerned because it is the driving force [of the film]. If you pull that out, then what do you have? You don’t have anything real.
“When I first read the screenplay, [Virginia’s death is] like page five, and I was glued when that happened. So I knew what that feeling felt like, and I knew that people could get over it.”
He also compared Virginia’s early death to the opening of the original Happy Gilmore, in which Happy watches his father be killed by a stray hockey puck as a child.
“There’s darkness in the first one,” Newacheck continued. “There’s real dark humour. So I just felt it [was] fitting.”
Bowen previously stated that she didn’t expect to return for the sequel, having assumed that the film’s producers would want to seek out a younger woman to lead the movie.
In the same interview, she also vaguely teased Virginia’s demise, hinting that she doesn’t have an enormous amount of screentime in the sequel.
“But Adam’s like, ‘Stop saying that. You’re the heart of the movie.’”
Sandler recently revealed that the death of an important co-star from the original movie was one of the key reasons it took so long for a sequel to be made, as the film’s script had to be re-written.
Happy Gilmore 2 is streaming on Netflix.
