Happy Gilmore 2 (2025)
Directed by: Kyle Newacheck
Premise: A sequel to the 1996 film. Hockey player turned golf pro Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler) has fallen on hard times. He stages a golf comeback, competing in a tournament that will determine the sport’s future.
What Works: Happy Gilmore 2 comes nearly three decades after its predecessor. This is a legacy sequel and part of the appeal of legacy sequels is fan service. The original Happy Gilmore has a following especially among golfers and moviegoers who saw the original film in their youth. The sequel includes plenty of callbacks to the original film. It also works in a lot of cameos by real life professional golfers. The story accounts for the passage of time. It doesn’t rely on too many old man jokes but the filmmakers do reimagine some of the original movie’s key set pieces and plot points from an older perspective.
What Doesn’t: The filmmakers of Happy Gilmore 2 follow one of the cliches of legacy sequels: reintroducing past heroes as disillusioned and broken. We’ve seen the premise in Rocky Balboa, Rambo, Halloween, and the Indiana Jones and Star Wars sequels. Happy Gilmore 2 does this as well. Happy is now a widowed alcoholic who lost the family home that he fought for the first time around. It’s a severe turnaround, especially for what is supposedly a comedy, and the premise refutes the ending of the original picture. The callbacks to the original Happy Gilmore are often forced. Not only do the filmmakers repeat gags and character moments from the 1996 film but they match those moments with flashback footage from the original Happy Gilmore, obnoxiously underlining the connection between the movies. The callbacks are almost always ends in themselves. They’re not part of the story, just reminders of what the fans loved about the 1996 film. The material doesn’t match. The new film is shot in the flat digital style of many Netflix comedies and the inserts from the 1996 film garishly stick out. Happy Gilmore 2 suffers from weird and clumsy clashes of tone. That’s especially evident in the way the filmmakers deal with alcoholism. A few moments are serious but other scenes unsuccessfully try to turn substance abuse and recovery into a joke. This material could be funny if it were handled right but these moments, and the entire film, are absent of wit or inspiration. Happy Gilmore 2 feels phoned in. It’s not funny and no one is really trying, least of all Adam Sandler. The original Happy Gilmore was not a great movie but it was one of the better versions of Sandler’s manchild-does-good formula. He doesn’t try to repeat that persona here and the sequel lacks the underdog quality that made Sandler likable. The whole joke of Happy Gilmore was a crass, blue-collar outsider crashing the posh world of golf. In Happy Gilmore 2 the character defends the golf establishment, discarding the outsider quality that made the character interesting in the first place.
Disc extras: Available on Netflix.
Bottom Line: Happy Gilmore 2 feels like a movie no one wanted to make but it was forced into existence to fulfill a perceived market demand. It is limp and uninspired without any of the charm or humor that endeared the original movie to so many people.
Episode: #1059 (August 3, 2025)