For a particular contingent of American moviegoer — one born in the mid-to-late 1980s, say — Happy Gilmore is something of a sacred cow. Its irreverence and sentimentality, its (admittedly softball) attempt at speaking truth to power by positioning Adam Sandler’s asshole-manchild against an even bigger asshole-manchild, and its hard juxtaposition of gross-out humor with approachable pop culture references resonated with countless children discovering the movie at the bottom of their uncles’ tape shelves. It became a cultural touchstone, the perennial favorite to put on while your friends tried and failed to light their farts on fire. Happy Gilmore is so obviously the crown jewel of the Happy Madison dynasty that it begins the very name of the brand, and it probably never occurred to its legion of fans that Sandler would return to it. He was welcome to revisit countless other ideas, desecrate them, defecate on them, but not Happy Gilmore. It’s too pure.
Yet Sandler’s puerile reach knows no bounds. In the 10 years since he abandoned theatrical exhibition for unknown truckloads of Netflix cash, his output has ranged from winsome to downright repugnant. It’s as if he spins a wheel, and wherever it lands determines how he decides how much effort he’ll put into a particular project. He typically lands somewhere between mildly interested and completely bored, so Happy Gilmore 2 comes as a great shock: it’s the freshest studio comedy since Ricky Stanicky, and the most inspired Sandler home turf effort in decades. It updates the successful Happy Gilmore formula for the 2020s, imbues it with (more or less) the right amount of nostalgia, and, most importantly, actually evokes laughs.
The story is approximately the same underdog yarn as the original, contrived to keep Happy on the outs from pro golfing after the untimely death of his wife Virginia (Julie Bowen) forced him into an early retirement. He’s moved to the other side of the tracks — the side where Steve Buscemi pisses in mailboxes — and taken to drinking heavily out of any crevice he can find: cucumbers, trophies, even golf balls. The humor delivers the same flavor of flatulent juvenilia everyone has come to expect from Sandler, but in addition to the olfactory gags, there’s an exuberance emanating from Happy Gilmore 2 that is absent in a lot of Sandler’s other Netflix work — of which Tim Herlihy, Sandler’s original screenwriting partner, is the secret wellspring. When Sandler is at his best, Herlihy is always the co-writer; he’s Sandler’s beating heart. Herlihy zeroes in Happy Gilmore 2’s narrative on Happy’s family dynamic and his attempt to sober up as he returns to the golf course, which lends the movie a frat boy-made-good earnestness and gives the underdog approach some genuine credibility. Improbably, it’s the best movie about alcoholism since Robert Zemeckis’s Flight.
As the ringmaster of his own carnival of outcasts and nitwits, Sandler has always flown with a close cadre — often to mixed results. But the newest member of Sandler’s working family, Kyle Newacheck (of Workaholics fame), holds his own as director, straightening the cast’s backs and injecting enough verve to successfully one-up Murder Mystery, his initial passable sally into the Sandler-verse. Happy Gilmore 2’s candy-colored grading, diversions into handheld, and generous implementation of the drone shot distinguish it visually from the rest of Sandler’s Netflix fare — it’s also a movie that feels refreshingly like it was made in and for the year 2025. Podcasts, smartphones, Love Island; it’s so rare to get a contemporary movie unafraid to admit that it was made right now and unashamed to exist in the same world we do. And not for nothing, Newacheck gets a lot of the needle drops right: songs by Foreigner, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tom Petty, Bob Seger, and more pepper the soundtrack. It’s a dad rock buffet.
But then, of course, there’s the matter of the Happy Gilmore footage, chainsawing its way into the thick jungle of cameos, product placement, and dirty jokes in case we forgot or didn’t know what happened in the 1996 original. It’s generally extraneous and kind of useless, even for someone unfamiliar with the first film, because Happy Gilmore 2 already makes those references early, often, and loudly enough to signal them. One interesting moment arises from the diversion, however. In a dream, Happy and the ghost of Virginia find themselves inside his Happy Place. Virginia’s ghost pooh-poohs the retrograde fantasy and ribs him for it. The scene demonstrates a modicum of self-awareness: if we’re going to look backward, let it at least be done tongue-in-cheek.
20 years ago, the studio comedy was so ubiquitous that we took it for granted. Now, as it breathes what seems like its final dying breath, it’s reassuring to find its most seasoned practitioners sending it out to pasture — or a wide open, 300-yard green, such as the case may be — on their own terms. No one would accuse Sandler of going contemplative on us, but when he’s fighting Shooter McGavin in a cemetery and they lunge across headstones of deceased characters, or when Happy waves goodbye to loved ones (and Eminem) while “Tuesday’s Gone” plays, there’s an undeniable elegiac charge to it, a sense that what Sandler has done actually matters.
In a moving early scene, Happy sits with his family at the dinner table, stealing a nip from the pepper grinder as he looks on at his children. They smile and laugh, oblivious. All except one — his daughter Vienna, who looks right through him. “Swingin’ Party” by the Replacements fades in. “If being wrong’s a crime, I’m serving forever / if being strong’s your kind, then I need help here with this feather,” Paul Westerberg warbles. Known primarily for catchy punk numbers tinged with melancholy, it’s the kind of out-and-out vulnerable song they could’ve made more of, if they’d wanted to. The scene ends with Happy’s sons driving away, all four of them mooning him out the window of their van. Like the interior of that van or its antagonist’s breath, Happy Gilmore 2 should stink to high heaven, but its convincing mocktail of raunch and pathos affirms the Sandman can still conjure some magic — if he wants to.
DIRECTOR: Kyle Newacheck; CAST: Adam Sandler, Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, Bad Bunny, Benny Safdie; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: July 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min.
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