Happy Gilmore 2: A Long Shot That Mostly Lands

My initial impressions after watching Happy Gilmore 2 are that overall, I thought it as a pretty good comedy. For what it was after being a sequel to the classic 90s movie, I feel like it held up pretty well for a modern audience. However, there are still some trappings of making a movie for this certain type of viewer, particularly for a younger teenage demographic.

With the plot now revolving around the titular Happy Gilmore having to raise money for his daughter to go off to school after his retirement from golf, Happy has to step back onto the green to face some new foes and team up with some unlikely allies. The great characters like Happy and his rival Shooter McGavin still retain their goofy, absurdist charm from the original. However, trying to tie the simple story of Happy Gilmore into corporate plots, celebrity golfers, family drama and the battle of old versus new golf still felt like a way to try and reimagine this movie for a new generation with far too spinning plates. The gratuitous amount of famous cameos towards the last half an hour of the movie make this blatantly more apparent. Even though the original had figures like Bob Barker and Carl Weathers (both of whom get a callback in this movie), it still had enough heart and charm to carry its cast of characters and plot towards a satisfying finish.

Although most of the cameos in the second movie were still funny, it felt as though some parts of the movie were feeding off of the nostalgia of the first film. I’d say probably about a third of this movie is footage from the original, and don’t mistake me, that’s not a bad thing! The movie does make a point to progress Happy’s story, like the unfortunate death of his wife, his struggle of raising his five kids and his less than triumph return back to the world of golf. The amount of callbacks and references celebrated almost every character, from the more well-known ones like Shooter to the smaller one off side characters that still made an impact from the first film. In the end, though, the stench of the trendy, new and hip generation (shown to us by villains of MAXI Golf - a not-so-subtle nod to influencers like MrBeast and Logan Paul) being beaten by the “old timers” reeks of trying to figure out where the original story would’ve gone next. I think it feeds into the larger aspect of studios nowadays wanting to feed off the nostalgia of “classic” movies. There was a simpler time where you could have a story as absurd as Happy Gilmore lean into its genre and know it made sure that you laughed along with it. There’s a reason that people were excited for this movie almost 30 years later; it was a chance for these types of movies to come back into the mainstream.

For a movie that I don’t think many people were asking for, it was a pleasant surprise of a release to not only see how much the original cast had grown, but to see that the elements that made the original good were still there. (although buried under the constant finger pointing of “Oh, I know who that is!” if you’ve been on the Internet at all during the last 30 year hiatus from the first movie).

My Rating: 8/10