Cert – 12, Run-time – 1 hour 58 minutes, Director – Kyle Newacheck
Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler) is forced out of retirement to fund his daughter’s (Sunny Sandler) future in ballet. However, traditional golf is being threatened by a new, high-powered, video-game style of gameplay.
While some may accuse Adam Sandler of simply making films with his friends, cameos from the likes of Steve Buscemi and co have at least brought some amusement to the proceedings. However, when an entire film, one that’s almost two whole hours long, is crammed full of them – as if reporters and fellow golfers have been added almost for the sake of bringing in another famous face – it starts to wear thin quickly.
29 years after the original Happy Gilmore, one of Sandler’s more well-regarded films from his earlier years, the legacy sequel sees Gilmore (Sandler) down on his luck. After losing his style in the wake of his wife’s (Julie Bowen) golf-accident death he’s scraping by with work in a supermarket. However, when it’s recommended that his daughter (Sunny Sandler) attended ballet school in Paris the money to get her there seems as if it can only be raised by taking part in a golf tournament. However, with no help from alcohol, Happy’s skills have faded and he needs to get them back quickly.
Cue a first hour full of practice sessions on out-of-the-way courses and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, featuring Sandler’s other daughter Sadie as the most supportive member of the group and Ben Stiller’s returning Hal L from the first film. Yet, while all this plays out in the background billionaire Frank Manatee (Benny Safdie) is trying to push Maxi Golf, a super-powered, video game style new form of gameplay made up of ultra elites, potentially including old Gilmore rival Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald – seemingly enjoying not holding back with his performance), fresh from prison. Maxi comes much more to the fore in the third act tournament. With all the colours, powers and stats which fill in the screen, and the general atmosphere of the sequences, Happy Gilmore 2 eventually ends up feeling like a video game adaptation that tried to keep as many of the visuals intact as possible, almost close to a let’s play of a game that doesn’t exist.
There’s a lot going on in this film, largely because of how many characters there are playing a part in Happy’s life. Each making a running joke, most of which fail to properly land. There are a couple of light chuckles here and there, but really not enough to justify a two-hour run-time. Instead, famous faces pop up here and there with the intended effect almost feeling like a point of recognition rather than a laugh from what they’re doing. Bring in the various callbacks and references to the small, much-quoted characters of the original and it starts to feel like Happy Gilmore 2 is largely just ticking boxes of fan service before jumping into a crazier comedy focusing on big scale crazy golf.
The underdog feeling of the original just doesn’t seem to be here. We know that Happy can play golf, especially when he gets back to the level he was once at. And the seemingly superpowered elite players of Maxi Golf with their colourful, cartoonish costumes appear to be angled as the golf equivalent of the Globo Gym Purple Cobras but never have the same effect, perhaps due to spending such little time with them apart from some lines of dialogue for Haley Joel Osment as main rival Billy Jenkins.
With so much going on, Happy Gilmore 2 simply feels like a messy jumble of ideas where instead of forming an underdog narrative the focus became creating characters and moments for Sandler’s friends and family to come to set for a day and make an appearance. It quickly becomes tired with the majority of gags faltering under repetition both from this film and the original.
There are more cameos than laughs in Happy Gilmore 2 which feels almost specifically designed to bring in as many of Adam Sandler’s friends and family as possible, leading to repetitive gags in a film that forgets its underdog stylings and instead leads to an overdone video game style golf tournament.
Just A Little Bit Random 