Happy Gilmore 2 Review
The IP legacy sequel comes for all of us, even Adam Sandler. He’s been happily nestled making original comedies on Netflix that give the company the numbers they like and him the autonomy to create his brand of humour that he probably wouldn’t have in today’s brutal post-COVID theatrical landscape. And every once in a while, Adam still shows he can go to town with today’s prestige actors like he did in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Uncut Gems (a passion project tailored for Sandler by the Safdie Brothers that catapulted both parties to new levels of respect) and 2022’s Hustle.
Later this year, he’ll re-team with Baumbach in awards player, Jay Kelly, but before that, Sandler has come through with this year’s Netflix summer blockbuster, where he trots out the legacy of one of his most beloved characters, Happy Gilmore, in Happy Gilmore 2. One may wonder why Sandler feels the need to do this, despite having the freedom to pinball between singular original comedies and a vessel for the great auteurs of the 21st Century, is there an approach from both that could warrant the return of the golfing legend to our screens?
Picking up 29 years after the original (that I have not seen since my childhood, sorry guys), Happy (Adam Sandler) comes out of the dusts of grief that has derailed his life to the point where he works at a local supermarket in a downgraded inner city house with his daughter, Vienna (played by Adam’s actual daughter, Sunny Sandler) who has big ambitions of being a ballet dancer that will not get fulfilled unless she goes to one particular ballet school in Paris that costs money to be sent to. Money that Happy does not have. All of these emotional lynchpins lead us to Happy through himself back into golf and confronting what really made him leave in the first place.
There’s a unique identity crisis in Happy Gilmore 2 where it’s clearly aiming for something more earnest and classically “sports movie” surrounding loss, ageing, family and addiction coming from the mature prestige era of Sandler, yet it is beholden to be a sequel to one of Sandler’s reigning cult classics. So what we do get is something that doesn’t feel quite as cynical as this should be, but ultimately gets lost in the humour, callbacks and cameos.
Now, I’m not asking Adam Sandler to turn his comedy legacy sequel into something it isn’t, even with some dramatic edge, that’s just not what this is, but throughout Happy Gilmore 2, it’s evenly split between joke sections and serious sections that feel almost independently conceived of each other. There’s a fun gag with various items in Happy’s possession being turned into drinking flasks from his iPhone, his driver club and an actual golf that amused me but most of this is trying to recreate what the first was doing tone-wise and even joke-wise as characters recur and some cameos even refer to themselves as the children of original characters. There’s a part of Happy Gilmore 2 that knows the good times are over and also there’s a need to keep them going without acknowledging the time that has passed.
It’s a shame because Sandler is committed as always in the film’s dramatic and comedic moments. Benny Safdie feels weirdly at home in a Sandler comedy as the ridiculous Frank Manatee, an antagonist whose “Maxi-Golf” league threatens the sanctity of the sport as his hip ligament-deficient players can knock the ball across the drive further than any normal player.
But as much as Happy Gilmore 2 stuffs itself with every famous person in 2025, from prestige actors to podcasters, there’s enough care put into some elements here that I didn’t end this feeling depressed. And that’s a credit to some of the sweetness on display here, even if I didn’t laugh nearly as much as I wanted to, this remains watchable throughout and an effort, just not on the level that I would enjoy.
★★ 1/2
On Netflix July 25th / Adam Sandler, Sunny Sandler, Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, Ben Stiller, Benny Safdie, Bad Bunny, Travis Kelce, Margaret Qualley, Eric Andre / Happy Madison Productions, Netflix / 12A
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