After his breakout on Saturday Night live in the early 1990’s, Adam Sandler starred in two movies that showed the world he could be a successful movie star on his own. Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore debuted in 1995 and 1996, respectively, built on Sandler’s own brand of absurdist comedy. As a symbol of his subsequent success, Adam Sandler combined the two film titles to form the name of his production company, Happy Madison. With Happy Gilmore being the bigger financial and critical success of the two films, Adam Sandler finally stated, in 2022, that he wanted to make a sequel. Now three years after that statement, Happy Gilmore 2 is officially out on Netflix bringing back basically everyone it could from the original cast, just thirty years older.
The film sees a fifty eight year old Adam Sandler playing a washed up version of Happy Gilmore who has now quit golf. Most of the movie revolves around Gilmore returning to the form of his glory days so that he can ironically save the traditions of golf and the PGA.
However, the movie is more about the cameos than anything else. From Travis Kelce to Bad Bunny to Post Malone to Steve Buscemi to Kid Cudi to Jeopardy’s Ken Jennings, and the Food Network’s Guy Fieri, to a slew of professional golfers, the cameos feel as never-ending as they do random. Probably the funniest and one of the most absurd parts of the movie is seeing these random celebrities appear with no rhyme or reason, leaving you constantly questioning if that’s really Guy Fieri announcing a golf tournament or Kid Cudi playing a random FBI agent, and perhaps leaving you asking more important questions like, why is Guy Fieri announcing a golf tournament and why is Eric Andre playing a character whose only purpose is to appear on screen as a regular guy. As much as I want to say that the film’s choice to solely rely on celebrity cameos and nostalgia from the first movie made for a bad experience, I had a lot of fun with the cameos, and I thought this comedy was some of the most effective material in the movie.
Unfortunately though, I thought it was mostly in the new stuff where the film falls flat. The story – if you can even call it one coherent story – is terribly generic and uninspired. It is somehow even more predictable than I expected and really just felt so thrown together in the least imaginative way. There are just so many characters and storylines. The filmmakers are continuing a lot of material from the first movie, while also adding another set of villains and plotlines on top of it. It’s basically multiple movies thrown together. This practice of just adding the most amount of stuff possible leaves so much of the movie feeling inconsequential and forgotten – highlighted by Ben Stiller’s character feeling so insignificant to the plot, it almost seems like they forgot to write him into the movie and added his part after filming had wrapped.
I think the movie somehow works best when it’s picking up where it left off three decades ago. Some of the best comedy comes from Shooter McGavin’s character, Chubbs’ son, and absurdist ideas that feel like they could have come out of the first movie such as Happy using every possible object as a flask. The only addition to the original story that I can say definitively improved the film was Bad Bunny’s appearance. Growing in his comfortability on screen with each movie he’s in, Bad Bunny impressively manages to fit the vibe of a nineties Adam Sandler comedy, while still bringing his own personality.
Outside of the copious amount of cameos and Bad Bunny’s appearance, there’s really not much to say about the movie, so I’ll leave my review fairly short. It’s similar to the first movie – just a weird, sort of made-for-TV version of it. It will most likely give you some laughs, especially if you enjoyed the original, and it can be fun at times, as long as you don’t go in with any real expectations.
