Adam Sandler doesn’t do political puffery, but you’ve got to wonder why his sequel to Happy Gilmore — about a golf pro with anger issues whose long-drive swing keeps him winning — appears now when leftist-dominant Hollywood pretends to fear a golf-loving retaliatory authoritarian occupying the White House.
In Happy Gilmore 2, Sandler answers that panic with a joyous American comedy. It’s one of his character-study parties for Netflix (like Hubie Halloween, The Ridiculous Six, The Do-Over, The Week Of, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah) where stressful relationships are benevolently overcome. Right now, Sandler’s optimism in Happy Gilmore 2 contrasts with the hipster nihilism of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, reminding us of unifying possibilities that cynical, dishonest culture urges us to forget.
Sandler and co-screenwriter Tim Herlihy revisit the 1996 original’s sports metaphor according to which Happy (Sandler), a quick-to-anger-then-apologize fellow, pivoted from his love of professional ice hockey and its pugilistic athleticism to more relaxed gentlemanly exertion on the green links. He had won five Tours and married golf publicist Virginia (Julie Bowen). They raised a family of four raucous boys — named after Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Hull, and Terry Ryan — and daughter Vienna (Sunny Sandler) until tragedy leaves him widowed and alcoholic.
Happy Gilmore 2 expands his recovery, returning to golf to win money for Vienna’s ballet training in Europe. His comeback resembles a second term, discovering a more complicated sports industry and a more poisonous antagonism from the high-tech upstart Maxi league (resembling the early controversy with LIV Golf). Owner Frank Manatee (Benny Safdie) personifies the treachery and politicization of everything in sports, from economics to sexualized golfing style.
Not necessarily a political comedy, Happy Gilmore 2 revives the social imperatives always felt in Sandler’s films through their social, cultural, and ethnic subtext. While One Battle After Another shows how easy it is to wax political, Sandler consistently clears the hurdles of tribalism, ethnicity, and social power. His comic focus on individual eccentricities provides political commentary but in genial terms. (There’s even a goofy version of Trump’s First Step Act.) Sandler’s common touch was popular until adverse press response forced him out of the Hollywood mainstream; he retreated to a sinecure at Netflix where his benevolent worldview makes the most of that in-group/outsider distinction.
When Happy first learned golf etiquette and strategy from one-handed mentor Chubbs (Rocky’s Carl Weathers) or engaged fisticuffs with elderly Bob Barker, Sandler kidded American anomalies. Happy chastens his roistering brood, “We fight in the basement, not at the table!” It flips the miserable inevitability of the art-house family-wrestling flick The Iron Claw, for common-folk understanding. (And that Barker fight becomes the source for an egotistic video game featuring the likeness of Tiger Woods.)
Happy’s not a hockey player; as the late Virginia told him, he’s a golfer in love with masculine aggression as proof of his manhood. When Happy the sales clerk first battles Manatee, he asks his store supervisor, “Can you turn the security cameras off for like 90 seconds?” to teach the braggart a lesson. This sly Jeffrey Epstein reference bests Anderson’s over-obvious political alarm. The good-naturedness behind Sandler’s slapstick violence shows the mellowed tendency of an aging 59-year-old mensch.
Sandler’s bar-mitzvah-banquet genre is the closest American movies get to the emotional amplitude of France’s Jean Renoir. Understanding Renoir’s dictum “Everyone has his reasons,” Sandler refuses Anderson’s racist antagonism and instead calls on the power of positive thinking. Critics who congratulate Anderson’s fantasy race war (its implicit white self-hatred) ignore Sandler’s contrasting celebration of golf’s desegregated pastime and its multiracial signification.
Christopher McDonald’s reformed villain Shooter McGavin redeems himself in a graveyard of familiar tombstones. Black golf expert Slim Peterson (Lavell Crawford) adjusts his friendship with Happy, admitting, “It’s like I was using you to keep my hate alive.” Yet Happy defends their victorious united front, saying, “I always powered my drives the old-fashioned way — with rage.” (Top that, Paul Thomas Anderson!)
Happy’s candid golfing competition highlights the sport’s current cavalcade of white champions Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka, Rory McIlroy, and Scottie Scheffler — “Basic Vanilla Regular Golfers” who reprove the trend of turning Americans against themselves. Their skill and goodwill is challenged by diverse opponents, caddie Oscar (Bad Bunny) and his cousin Esteban (Marcello Hernández). As the farce climaxes, rousingly paced by director Kyle Newacheck, the interplay recalls a multiracial Marx Brothers jamboree. (The “Lob Wedge” and “iliolumbar ligament” gags are up to classic ’30s screwball.)
Like the current POTUS, Sandler is such an across-the-aisle unifier of celebrities from Lee Trevino, Jack Nicklaus, and Jordan Spieth to Travis Kelce and Post Malone that even McGavin’s “Back to their shanties!” declaration shows an understanding of class superior to that of anyone else working in Hollywood or the Beltway. Sandler loves the American vernacular and makes us love it, too.
Much of the film’s joke logic is as funny as the encounter with the waitress in Bob Dylan’s “Highlands.” Plus, Sandler has always had a knowing fondness for good pop music, this time outclassing Anderson’s perversion of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” by closing non-sarcastically with Petty’s “The Waiting,” a perfect anthem for a film star and good sport who dreams of utopia.