Happy Gilmore 2 brings the celeb cameos but pales next to its predecessor

Australia Broadcast Center

3 days ago

Maybe our heroes do become conservative in their middle age.
What: 30 years after up-ending the golf world, a down-on-his-luck Happy Gilmore returns to do battle with an extreme sports league.
Starring: Adam Sandler, Benny Safdie, Christopher McDonald, Bad Bunny, Haley Joel Osment, Ben Stiller, Margaret Qualley, Eric Andre, Eminem, Steve Buscemi, Travis Kelce, Julie Bowen.
Director: Kyle Newacheck
Where: Streaming on Netflix now.
Likely to make you feel: Stuck in the rough.
Nearly 30 years after Happy Gilmore — the slobs-versus-snobs classic that helped make Adam Sandler a superstar — the angry misfit who once up-ended the golfing world has become part of the establishment, teeing off against the kind of extreme sports league he almost certainly would have embraced in his youth.
At 58, Sandler is no longer the scourge of film critics and other humourless bores.
In 2025, he's a one-man family franchise, an actor with a string of acclaimed indie film credits, and the recipient of the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humour. Perhaps this sequel's strange, vaguely self-hating perspective is to be expected — especially from a performer who built his brand playing "rageaholic" man-children.
The Sandman's career tension is one of the few curious ripples in the otherwise uninspired Happy Gilmore 2. It's a breezy and intermittently funny comedy that sticks to the playbook of every decades-later sequel, sending its hero back to zero to lazily rehash the beats of its predecessor.
Having won a bunch of championships, fathered five kids and become a pro-sports hall of famer, Happy Gilmore (Sandler) bottoms out after one of his famous power shots accidentally kills his wife, Virginia (Julie Bowen) — a narrative swing (pun intended) that teases out a bit of the cruelly absurdist Sandler of old.
He's soon in (and on) the drink, boozing, broke and forced to move into a low-rent house with his teenage daughter (Sunny Sandler), a gifted ballet dancer whose dream of studying in Paris costs the kind of money that — you guessed it — only a professional golf salary and a movie training montage can provide.
Meanwhile, startup bro Frank Manatee — played with unsettling facial hair by Benny Safdie, who co-directed Sandler's career-high Uncut Gems — is out to establish the Maxi Golf League, an extreme sports version of the game with gnarly, flame-lit fairways and golf carts that look like monster trucks.
As someone with no interest in golf — unless an animatronic monkey is swinging its paw above the hole — I have to say Manatee's plans sound like a pretty entertaining upgrade, tradition be damned.
To crush his competition, the upstart entrepreneur has enlisted a bunch of players — including Billy Jenkins, played by Sixth Sense star Haley Joel Osment — and had them surgically modified to out-hit the Happy Gilmore power drive.
Oh, and he's also liberated Gilmore's old nemesis — that quintessential 90s movie jerk, Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald) — from the psychiatric institution where he's been steaming for the better part of three decades.
Director Kyle Newacheck's (Workaholics) undemanding sequel, which Sandler co-wrote with long-time collaborator (and Happy Gilmore screenwriter) Tim Herlihy, is essentially a play-by-play redux of the first film. When it's not invoking earlier jokes or characters, it's dropping in scenes from its predecessor as flashbacks that do the new film's ugly streaming aesthetic no favours.
As with most late Sandler joints, it's made with affection, and everyone involved appears to have had a blast. It's an energy that carries the movie for a stretch, delivering a kind of snapshot of middle-aged American male culture at its goofiest and most endearing. With his workout headband and carrot-top curls, Safdie is especially gleeful to watch, while Ben Stiller and his handlebar moustache make a welcome return as the retirement home orderly turned oily, self-help scammer.
Testament to Sandler's cultural pull is the cavalcade of cameos, which include Post Malone, Travis Kelce, Eminem, Guy Fieri and a bunch of famous golfers, plus some amusing supporting turns from Bad Bunny, Eric Andre and Margaret Qualley.
If you've ever wanted to see Slim Shady tangling with alligators or Kelce facing off with a hungry bear, then this may indeed be the movie for you.
The problem, as with most legacy sequels, is that the urge to mine easy nostalgia means the filmmakers fail to find new dimensions in the material. Despite looking right at home in his hockey jersey, sweatpants and Timbalands, Sandler has become a much more interesting performer since those early days — you just have to look at his emotional comedy special from last year, Adam Sandler: Love You (also directed by Benny Safdie), to see a performer in full command of his gift.
There's nothing in Happy Gilmore 2 that approaches the scene in the original in which the ice-rink janitor lip-syncs Endless Love while the skaters twirl, a comedy moment so inspired — and so beautiful — that it moves me every time.
The sequel does little more than point its audience back to its predecessor, which might be good business for Sandler and his Happy Madison Productions, but won't add up to much more than forgettable afternoon viewing for everyone else.
Happy Gilmore 2 is streaming on Netflix now.