Directed By Kyle Newacheck

Starring – Adam Sandler, Sunny Sandler, Julie Bowen

The Plot – Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler) makes a big splash when he returns to the golf course, in an effort to fund his daughter’s (Sunny Sandler) college fees towards a prestigious school.

Rated PG-13 for strong adult language, crude/sexual material, partial nudity and some thematic material.

Happy Gilmore 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix

POSITIVES

Aside from an abundance of pre-cooked nostalgia that entices audiences to want to spend nearly two hours alongside these characters, nearly thirty years after the previous installment, the film does provide a compelling plot that at least ironically reflects the stakes and circumstances that the game of golf currently finds itself in, a fact made all the more ironic considering two of the PGA’s biggest defectors in Brooks Koepka and Bryson Dechambeau, two LIV golfers, stand as characters on the side of team tradition to cement a dream team with Gilmore, Rory Mcllroy and Scott Scheffler. For a golf fan like me, this is the dream team equivalent to watching all of your dreams come true, and considering a majority of the storytelling lazily reflect the movements of the first film, the longer you think about it, this conflict serves as the single bout with originality that the movie had going for it, regardless of bafflingly appalling execution that also stood as the single most defining moment when this movie flew off of the deep end. Aside from a compelling angle, I loved that the script tapped into the evolution in the Happy Gilmore character, with a toxic thirst for alcohol that has repeatedly gotten the better of him after an untimely death that was the only surprising aspect of the entire movie. The death itself will immediately divide audiences from the opening five minutes, but it allows Happy to tap into the darkest aspects of his life that seamlessly reflect how far athletes fall when they’re away from the public eye, and how far Happy will work to get himself back to playing shape for this secondary chapter. These are the moments when Sandler effortlessly silences the doubters that he is phoning in a nostalgic paycheck, because Adam gives one of his most energetic performances in a comedy since “Click”, and the inconsistent material is made all the better for it, especially considering Sandler digs deep in his deliveries to pull something memorable out for something that could easily be defined by streaming quality. While the script doesn’t dig as emotionally deep as I was hoping, there is a sentimental quality in watching Adam act alongside his children that gives Happy growth in an evolutionary arc, bringing along much of the same extreme bursts of frantic rage that Happy exuded during the original installment, while also reflecting the growth that thirty years of time has transpired in outlining a responsible head of the household. Being that this is an Adam Sandler movie, it should go without saying that he assembles a dream team of celebrity cameos, but the extensive limitless expectations don’t even begin to cut it, as athletes, comedians, actors, and even musicians show up to get in on the fun, and it crafts this sort of gift unwrapping that conjures a surprise behind every corner that makes this feel as big as you can imagine. While the cameos themselves typically result in a scene or two of exposure, they do elicit fun in the ridiculousness of the unorthodox characters that they envelope, and if the movie proves nothing else it’s that Sandler has a lot of friends, and he makes sure all of them receive a day of pay for a dream sequel that they never expected would come to fruition. Rounding out the positives, while the special effects feel a bit wonky in their manifesting, the game is documented far more superior to that of the original movie, with a variety of camera motions and overall documentation that inscribes a legitimacy in presentation to the way the sport is currently documented. This aspect alone does help the film kind of transcend some of the cheap visuals that are casually littered throughout underwhelming editing practices, but beyond that reach a synthetic link to the movie’s lighthearted atmosphere that tells you everything that you need to know about this film almost immediately, proving Netflix did provide a legitimate budget for a funnyman who helped make their streaming app a household name.

NEGATIVES

When I heard that they were making a sequel to a 1996 comedy that didn’t truly warrant one, I had my concerns, and after watching “Happy Gilmore 2”, I can say that a lot of those fears unfortunately come to fruition, beginning with an inconsistency in effective gags that makes this often feel every inch of its nearly two hour runtime. To be fair, I did laugh quite a bit throughout the film’s duration, but I found a majority of those instances pertaining to fresh material in the screenplay that manifested in this original installment, instead of the endless fan service that it continuously unloads in resurrecting gags from the original movie. Sometimes the incorporation leads to a scene’s momentum halting dead in its tracks, like a continuous gag of Gilmore indulging in various household items that double as a flask, while other times (Like Rob Schneider resurrecting his “You can do it” gag in a movie he never was a part of) it doesn’t make sense at all, and for a sequel to one of the 90’s greatest slapstick comedies, the material here can’t even come close to measuring up, with bombs so loud and unresponsive to individual sequences that they come across as cornily cringy instead of creative, feeling every bit like a 50-year-old writer crafting material desperately for young adult audiences. In addition to this, the script goes out of its way to harvest nostalgia in the most meandering methods, with new characters frequently enacting ties to a character from the previous film, to cement one of the most convenient settings that has ever surfaced in a film. If this is done once or twice, it can be easily forgivable, especially in Happy seeking out these characters for a meaningful purpose on his journey, however the coincidences really start to get ridiculous by the film’s midway point, with a scene inside of a graveyard serving as a virtual Blue’s Clues game of familiar Easter Eggs, all in the means of fooling the audience into thinking that they’re having a good time, but instead coming up with the laziest means of connecting to an audience that I’ve seen in quite sometime, a fact made all the more evident with a screenplay that starts originally enough, before backing itself into a corner while emulating many of the same movements of the original movie. If this isn’t enough, the film features my least favorite editing technique that not only proves that it has no faith in its audience to remember a classic comedy like “Happy Gilmore”, but also that this is a movie that completely obliterates subtleties, with one of the more apparently obvious indulgences in the Sandler library of unoriginal Netflix movies. The technique pertains to these jarringly abrasive call-backs to previous characters and gags that correspond in an abrupt flashback, seconds after they’re mentioned, and like the berries of remembrance littered casually throughout the comedy, the intention could be forgiven with one, two or even forty-two instances of flashbacks, but the film feels like a virtual drinking game that made me shiver with rage, each time the dialogue makes a reference to the previous film, and even if you’ve somehow never seen the 1996 original movie, fear not, because the film summarizes it throughout the duration of this film, casually and constantly reminding us of the better film that we should be watching. Finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about the extreme golf tournament featured in the movie’s climax, as it represents the jumping off point to the movie that sacrificed any chance of me actually having a good time with a comedy sequel, for once. While I previously mentioned my interest in how this dynamic reflects what’s really going on with the sport in real life, I regretfully state that the special effects and visuals take a grave beatdown during this timeframe, the character writing goes out the window with their respective arcs (Particularly a fascinating redemption arc for Shooter McGavin), and the material weaves the film into feeling like a parody of itself, with totally illogical actions by its antagonists that made this the first movie this year that I’ve described as irredeemably immature. Not only is it difficult to follow along with just what in the hell is transpiring before our eyes in the game, with rules thrown out the window, but it also sacrifices any emotional layering to the film that went abandoned with Happy’s own aforementioned alcoholism coming into the fray, feeling like the most annoyingly jarring fanfiction that off-of-their-medication audiences can conjure, with little in the face of legitimate stakes or sensibility to bizarre execution of just what transpires. Regretfully, it has to be seen to be believed.

OVERALL
“Happy Gilmore 2” might unabashedly manipulate people into thinking that it’s a hole in one of nostalgic nourishment, but this uninspired and lazy sequel can’t find the greens with any kind of original intuition of its own intentions, causing it to feel overwhelmed with the magnitude of the moment that sees thirty years of waiting paid off in the most underwhelming of ways. While Sandler still brings his best to material that can’t hold his clubs, the overstuffed two hour runtime featuring incessant call-backs and inconsistently prolonged gags makes it the worst kind uninspiring cash-grab, proving that almost everything that Netflix touches has me screaming “MISTA!! Get me out of here!!”

My Grade: 5.6 or D