If you never saw the first Happy Gilmore, 30 years ago, will you be lost now? No. Happy Gilmore 2, now streaming on Netflix, neither requires nor asks for your full attention. Adam Sandler is Happy Gilmore, returning to one of the broadly funny buffoonery roles that helped break him out of the SNL pack back then. Happy was a Bruins hockey freak whose power with a driver and bouts of Sandler Shouting powered him onto the professional golf scene. But decades later, due to various circumstances, he’s doing more drinking than driving. Can he up his game in time to fund his 16-year-old daughter’s ballet school dreams? Perhaps the approximately 9 trillion cameos in Happy Gilmore 2, from the worlds of celebrity, sports and music, will help him find the green again.
The Gist: Hey, it’s Julie Bowen, back in the Happy Gilmore universe as Virginia, Happy’s true love. Their baby, Gordie, is grown now, and in fact he’s grown into AEW Hurt Syndicate wrestler Maxwell Jacob Friedman. They have three other sons, too, who take after their father by getting into fights and performing dick jokes whenever possible. And they have a daughter, Vienna (played by Sandler’s real-life daughter Sunny), whose opportunity to study ballet in Paris is the five-iron to the butt Happy needs to get his life and golf game back in gear.
Alcoholism isn’t really a funny subject, and especially not when you keep beating the “joke” of Happy’s temptation. But when he’s not sipping whiskey from cutaway reservoirs in cucumbers and Callaways, Happy, with his unbloused Timberlands, baggy hockey sweaters, and Adidas trainers, is attempting his return to professional golf. There’s a villain on the scene impeding that. Not Shooter McGavin, though Christopher McDonald is also along for this ride. In Happy Gilmore 2, Benny Safdie is Frank Manatee, the rich owner of an energy drink company and the creator of a LIV Golf stand-in called Maxi. Frank’s golfers either look like American Gladiators or Billy Jenkins, a washed journeyman played by Haley Joel Osment, and Maxi presents an upstart challenge to the professional golf establishment. This time around, Happy Gilmore, with his mile-high drives and raging style, isn’t the disruptor. Alongside a few green jackets’ worth of veteran PGA cameos, he’ll lead the charge on the links against Frank’s team and Maxi’s low-rent video game antics.
Gee, wonder if he’ll see it through to victory. There are a few mildly funny training sequences here, set to obvious tunes from Foreigner and The Cult. There are a few nice moments between Sandler and Sunny Sandler as Vivi. But mostly in Happy Gilmore 2, there are cameos. One after the other they surface. Old golf guys. New golf guys. Bad Bunny and Travis Kelce. Eminem. Stephen A. Smith. Kelsey Plum. Boban Marjanović. Cam’ron. John Daly. Margaret Qualley. Sometimes these cameos are connected to old bits – You knew “You can do it” was gonna be in here – and sometimes they just float in space. Not really necessary and not really funny, just sort of there. Kind of like this thirty-years-later sequel itself.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? So is Sandler gonna make a Billy Madison sequel next? The original came out a year before Happy Gilmore, and his production company’s name is a portmanteau of these ’90s hit titles. (And for that matter, “Stop looking at me, Swaaan!” is probably our all-time favorite Sandler movie reference.) You could also stream any number of the other Adam Sandler-featuring Netflix movies he’s made in recent years – they’re all out there in the menus, a clickable box away, even the ones you never knew he made – but we’ll also point out Hustle from 2022. It’s still about sports, and like Happy Gilmore 2 is absolutely jacked with cameos. But Hustle’s also a nice example of Sandler working with his occasionally-seen more dramatic side.
Performance Worth Watching: Benny Safdie is probably the leader in the Happy Gilmore 2 clubhouse. As Frank Manatee, none of his lines leap out as straight gold. (No line anywhere in this movie does.) But Safdie manages to make Frank at once a bro’d out headband enthusiast, a guy who probably idolizes the moneybags psychos in Mountainhead, and a villain straight out of the White Goodman school. Manatee even comes complete with his own golf version of Globo Gym.
Memorable Dialogue: Lavell Crawford as Slim, who plays the one-armed son of the late great Carl Weathers’ Chubb Peterson: “You loved your wife, and you loved my dad. And they loved you, period. You know what else they loved? Golf. I talked to your little girl, and she said you got a chance to save the whole sport by playing against some clown league? Yeah? Well why don’t you go kick some Bozo ass, then?”
Sex and Skin: Nah, but there are lots of traffic cones and brooms being held near crotches.
Our Take: Maybe it’s the weekend, and you’ve got some time to kill, and you’re gonna scroll a movie while you watch your phone. Well, Happy Gilmore 2 has been specially formulated with a random celeb or athlete or musician cameo every 6 or 11 minutes or so. This is the Happy Gilmore 2 Guarantee™: You, in your couchrotting state, will receive a mild jolt of “Oh, it’s Jon Lovitz,” or “Hey, Margaret Qualley on a putting green” whenever you happen to look up. And while you were watching your phone, you weren’t missing much of anything pertinent about what Happy Gilmore 2 was scrolling. It just rolls through Happy’s dead-end life, through dead-end jokes about his sneaking drinks, and through dead-end references to and drop-ins from numerous Sandler joints past, until the whole thing dead-ends in a sophomoric golf shootout showdown.
Kind of incredibly, Adam Sandler does manage a few flashes where we start to care about Happy’s journey. But these add up to nothing, or are generally derailed by more lame cameos. (John Daly drinking hand sanitizer? What a laffer! Let’s do it twice!) What about Ben Stiller surfacing as a version of the manic elder-abusing orderly from the original movie? Does that get the ball in the hole for you?
Our Call: More like Happy Gil-less. This aimless, only-occasionally-sorta-kinda-funny sequel to one of Adam Sandler’s career-making movies doesn’t do much of anything with the character, or really anything at all. It’s a cameo clog instead, and as a sports comedy misses the green entirely. Happy Gilmore 2 is a SKIP IT.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.