"But in golf, even when you're at the top of your game, you can always shank one"
Few people in the entertainment industry are as critic-proof as Adam Sandler. Attempting to sit down and watch his latest effort, Happy Gilmore 2, I was quickly reminded that there's simply no point in viewing his films through a critical lens. To do so is the path to madness because keeping up with the sheer number of things that are wrong/insensitive/lazy with Happy Gilmore 2 is antithetical to its existence. Picking up a pen to jot something down, one can faintly hear Sandler's voice in their head going, "okay, buddy, we're just here to have fun, put the pen down."
There's plenty of fun to be had in Happy Gilmore 2, but unless you're part of Sandler's core built-in audience, you're likely going to sit there baffled by the frequent callbacks to the first film and the endless celebrity cameos. Happy Gilmore 2 is the ultimate inside joke movie, and why shouldn't it be? Fans have waited 29 years for this character's return, do you think Sandler's not going to give them exactly what they want?
This isn't Zoolander 2, a film absolutely baffled by what people enjoyed about the first one. Rather, it's a movie that exists to give fans of the first one another two hours to hang with their best bud Happy Gilmore and his coterie of colorful supporting characters. This is just one more in a long line of unambitious movies from Sandler that aim to just put a smile on the faces of people predisposed to enjoy his movies.
One must understand that there are two kinds of Adam Sandler movies. There's the bulk of his movies (stunted man child makes family proud) and then there's a small but noble group of films that consists of Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, Funny People, The Meyerowitz Stories, Uncut Gems, etc. It seems like a very small sliver of overlap in that Venn diagram of the two sides of his career, but you basically have to know what kind of Adam Sandler movie you're sitting down to watch beforehand, and your mileage may vary if you're not in that purple sliver.
Happy Gilmore 2 opens with our hero's exploits in the three decades since we last saw him, and things were going good for a while. He and his wife Virginia (Julie Bowen) have five children—four golf playing hooligan boys and a ballet dancing girl—but a shanked ball on Mother's Day leaves Happy a depressed and drunken widower. When an opportunistic tech billionaire-cum-energy drink magnate with epically bad breath Frank Manatee (Benny Safdie) offers Happy a boatload of money to help legitimize his new extreme competitor to the PGA, Happy agrees as it will help him send his daughter Vienna (Sunny Sandler) to a prestigious European ballet academy.
Old nemeses like Shooter McGavin (the always game Christopher McDonald) and sadistic orderly Hal (Ben Stiller) turn up, as do new allies like the long lost sons of the characters played by deceased actors like Chubbs (Carl Weathers), heckler Donald Floyd (Joe Flaherty), and Gilmore superfan Mr. Larson (Richard Kiel). It all builds to a fairly predictable final golf match that makes up the entire third act and is rotten with sport star cameos that I simply wasn't equipped to keep track of.
Knowing what we know now about Sandler as a person, Happy Gilmore is probably the character who is closest in spirit to Sandler himself. One person can read that statement and think, "so that earns him the right to roll out of his trailer and onto the set wearing whatever he himself was wearing that day?" and another can read that and think, "and that's why he's so endearing." As a critic, I've got a real problem being glue while watching the latest movie from rubber man supreme Adam Sandler.
There's no criticism I can level at Happy Gilmore 2 that will change the mind of anyone who wants to see it, and anyone who has seen the film would say that I'm only looking to pick it apart. The elusive truth lies somewhere in the middle, and the realization that Adam Sandler consistently delivers the exact movies his fans want from him just negates whatever nits I have to pick with it.
I guess, you just have to ask yourself, "Do I want to see Happy Gilmore 2?" and if the answer is yes, you're going to enjoy it. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person that remembers Sandler patting himself on the back for bringing back Julie Bowen for the sequel, only to kill her off five minutes in so his character has something to overcome, you're guaranteed to be disappointed. But that's the Adam Sandler conundrum.
RATING: ** (or **** or none, whatever you think)
Header image via IMDb