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Fleetingly Funny Happy Gilmore 2 Shanks its Repetitive Comedy

Fleetingly Funny Happy Gilmore 2 Shanks its Repetitive Comedy
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If ever a feature film has not needed to be two hours long, then surely that film is a 29 years belated sequel to Happy Gilmore. The follow-up to 1996’s classic Adam Sandler hockey-player-turned-pro-golfer farce stars a now 58-year-old Sandler as the title character, along with not only every (surviving) performer who occupied even a second of celluloid in the original, but also every actor or sports star with whom Sandler has interacted with at any point in the last three decades. Occasionally funny in spite of itself, particularly when relying on tried and true slapstick zaniness and the admittedly irresistible performance of Christopher McDonald as Shooter McGavin, it steadily becomes a punishing endurance run that belabors the same handful of gags to the point of nausea. Happy Gilmore 2 ends up trying to loft itself out of an impossibly deep sand trap of its own devising.

First things first: We need a reason for the world famous, decorated PGA champion Happy Gilmore to be forced out of retirement, which means our premise requires a fall from grace. This it accomplishes with unexpected brutality in its opening moments, so I won’t consider it a spoiler: Happy’s life is upended when one of his own errant drives kills his wife Virginia (poor Julie Bowen!) on the golf course, thrusting him into single, widower fatherhood, raising four sons and a daughter. Before long, the tempestuous Happy has lost everything, reduced to a middle-aged sad sack working at a local grocery store, nursing an out-of-control alcohol addiction that is consistently played for laughs rather than as a dire health crisis. He’s mostly content to look back on his faded dreams of ‘90s glory and live vicariously through his oafish squad of equally hot-headed idiot sons, and much more talented ballet dancer daughter Vienna … played by Sandler’s own 16-year-old daughter Sunny, with Happy Gilmore 2 clearly devised as a nepotistic launchpad for her career. But when Vienna is accepted to a prestigious Paris ballet school, the only way Happy can scrounge up the necessary cash is to return to the professional golf world in search of a few more paydays and rekindled esteem.

That would be a perfectly serviceable outline for a bog standard legacy sequel to Happy Gilmore, but the film, written by Sandler and longtime collaborator Tim Herlihy, ultimately takes us on a significantly stranger and more bloated odyssey. Happy’s return to the professional golf world is complicated by that world also being thrown into flux by the arrival of the “Maxi Golf” tour (an obvious LIV Golf parody), a brash and unconventional attempt to modernize the “boring” sport with loud, colorful obnoxiousness and gimmickry. This thrusts the one-time disruptor Gilmore into the new role of a protector of tradition, mirroring perhaps the way that Sandler himself went from a foul-mouthed SNL button pusher and provoker to a Netflix house brand churning out warmed-over streaming pablum, with the occasional dalliance into actual dramatic work ‘a la Uncut Gems–amusingly, director Benny Safdie returns the favor by portraying the villain here. It also has the genuinely unexpected side effect of putting Happy Gilmore in the same ideological boat as Shooter McGavin, whose insistence on the sanctity of the sport (his main beef with Gilmore in the original film) logically means that he would likewise detest Maxi Golf.

Shooter, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the highlight of Happy Gilmore 2 whenever he’s on screen, as Christopher McDonald has not lost a beat in depicting the charismatic, shit-eating egotist who likewise had most of the original’s best lines. The film really leans into its more absurd side in its reveal that McGavin has spent the last 29 years in a mental institution after being “found not guilty by reason of insanity” when he went on a rampage following the attempted theft of Happy’s gold PGA Tour jacket. When we meet him, he’s clearly nursing the most poorly hidden grudge since Sideshow Bob’s DIE BART DIE tattoo, which makes an eventual showdown with Happy a necessity. In the grand tradition of anime in which a defeated villain then becomes part of the protagonist crew, however, Shooter is eventually an ally in arms in defending the soul of what the film constantly refers to as “regular golf,” against the villainous, Dodgeball-esque Maxi Golf crew. Unfortunately, as in the same anime trope, this also reduces Shooter to an underused background player at the end of the day.

Happy Gilmore 2 does tug the occasional smile or guffaw, primarily through its enthusiastic deployment of classic, never-fail slapstick humor. As it rolls on, however, the cumulative and constant repetition of so many jokes and callbacks begins to weigh on the viewer, crushing you with familiarity at right about the point that an audience member is likely to realize that there’s still somehow an hour of runtime to go. This tension builds with no release, as we constantly meet more and more legacy characters, even when they’re single scene inventions, like the “son” of Richard Kiel’s nail-in-the-head former boss Mr. Larson, or the “son” of SCTV comedian Joe Flaherty’s “Jackass!” heckler. At the same time, the film indulges in constant use of what one would generously call “flashbacks,” but are instead literally just replayed clips of individual, seemingly random jokes from the 1996 film. This is a truly bizarre state of affairs: A movie that is simultaneously entirely reliant on nostalgia to exist, but simultaneously doesn’t seem to trust its audience to remember anything from the original film. That, or it just recognizes that at the end of the day, you’d probably rather be revisiting the 1996 version, so it might as well just unspool portions of it during its own bloated runtime.

To zero in on a specific joke for a pertinent example: The alcoholic Happy Gilmore (whose deeply irritating sons aren’t even concerned that he’s perpetually shitfaced) hides liquor everywhere in his surroundings in an astoundingly vast variety of flasks and decanters camouflaged as everyday objects. This gag, of Happy picking up an object and drinking lustily from it, must be repeated–with a conservative estimate–about two dozen times in the first 30 minutes of Happy Gilmore 2, and sporadically thereafter. If the joke was a dead horse, there would be nothing left to beat–the horse would have long since returned to the loam, and a nice fairway would have grown up in the interim. And yet the film still treats it as a laugh riot each and every time someone picks up an object and pours booze from it, seemingly growing only more confident in its own comedic genius as it goes.

So too does the film pummel the viewer with cameo after cameo, throwing random members of Sandler’s Hollywood orbit into a blender and then hitting “pulse.” When Happy joins a random threesome on a public golf course, who pulls up? Why, a group consisting of Eric Andre, Margaret Qualley and Please Don’t Destroy’s (of SNL) Martin Herlihy, that’s who. What’s that, Herlihy’s father is also the screenwriter? You don’t say. No cameo here is too incidental or too decadent, whether it’s the multiple WWE wrestlers, Sandler’s other daughter and wife, the countless PGA Tour golfers both active and retired, or John Lovitz or Guy Fieri each appearing on screen for literally a single joke. This kind of kitchen sink maximalism is absolutely exhausting, and that’s before we even get to the climactic Maxi Golf tournament, conducted on a ludicrous gimmick golf course full of tricks and traps straight out of Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.

Happy Gilmore 2 is every bit as suffocating and all-encompassing a legacy sequel as you might expect Adam Sandler to produce when seemingly handed a blank check and the ability to throw some patronage at his endless network of Hollywood friends and cronies. To its credit (or maybe not?), it doesn’t take the simplest of routes toward simply being a pro golf comeback story, but instead imagines a more strange and frenzied devolution of the sport it was once accused of cheapening. However, the sheer weight of its mindless repetition will wear on even the most nostalgia-fueled sense of appreciation–while it may generate some chuckles, it will also make you feel like you just lugged a bag up and down 36 holes with no cart.

Director: Kyle Newacheck
Writers: Adam Sandler, Tim Herlihy
Stars: Adam Sandler, Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, Benny Safdie, Bad Bunny, Ben Stiller
Release date: July 25, 2025


Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.

 
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