REVIEW:
Happy Gilmore 2 is the movie that finally hammers in the nail on the idea that Adam Sandler just isn’t funny anymore. In fact, he hasn’t been funny or made a funny movie in quite some time. Decades. The good news is he does actually have some dramatic acting chops, and is very talented in darker movies, be it Uncut Gens or Punch Drunk Love. But as far as comedy goes, this is the movie that finally puts things into perspective, not in a good way.
You see, Sandler has been starring in comedies since the mid-nineties. And in fact, that’s when he made his best movies. Billy Madison. The Wedding Singer. And of course Happy Gilmore. But for the past thirty years since then, he hasn’t done anything worthwhile (other than those aforementioned dramatic films.) Well, Happy Gilmore 2 represents the first time he’s gone back to the well. Yes, he’s made sequels before, like Grown Ups 2, but never a sequel to one of his earlier classics.
With that in mind, one would hope and maybe even expect that Sandler would get this one right. After all, the character is already there. All he has to do is do the same thing. Give us more of the same jokes we love. We will love them all over again, because of the nostalgia element, if nothing else. Only this movie doesn’t do that. It doesn’t really give us the same character (other than in name,) but instead an older, grumpier, more tired character. And yes, of course, Sandler himself is thirty years older, but this “new” version of the character is not what we want to see.
So let’s get into specifics just a bit. Sandler doesn’t have the same rage problem. And he doesn’t have the same immaturity. Instead, what he’s got are four kids. Ok… spoilers ahead now…The movie begins with his wife dying. Julie Bowens character, Virginia, from the first movie. They literally brought her back and put her in all the press and interviews for this thing only to kill her off in the opening montage. What a mistake. I understand that they needed to give Gilmore a reason for why he was down and out again, and in a bad place, but there had to be other ways. Have the two of them divorced, and he has to win her affection all over again. Have it that they never hit married and instead just dated and then broke up. Have it that she moved to another state for work and do they separated. Anything but this. It’s the definition of “fridging,” the female character, killing her off just to motivate the hero, something that was first coined after a Green Lantern comic and has since appeared in movies like Deadpool 2. Now, I have no problem with the love interest dying in a movie, such as in the Dark Knight, but to do it right at the start of the movie to a legacy character that people were excited to see return, just seems like lazy writing.
So now Gilmore is down and out on his luck again and broke again, and has to get back into golf to win some money. This time the motivation is to have enough money to send his daughter to college (last time it was about saving his grandmothers house.) From there we get a competing form of golf which is like turning the sport into an outdoor funhouse with all kinds of elaborate obstacles for players to have to hit through. And Gilmore has to play in a tournament like this. That “new golf,” idea is kind of fun. In fact, it’s probably the best thing about the movie. But the humor just isn’t there.
Here’s an example. In the first movie, Sandler would just go up to someone who was pissing him off and grab them and pull their shirt over their head and start beating on them. Here, he talks to a guy about doing it yo him before actually doing it. The guy wants money. They go back and forth discussing how much he will be paid. And then Sandler punches him. By the time the punch finally comes, the whole idea of it has become completely deflated. Another moment like this comes at a batting cage. In the first movie, Gilmore stood in front of a pitching machine and let the blast hit him. And a bug part of the joke was watching people’s reaction to this. Here, in the sequel, his caddy, played by Bad Bunny, walks though the area where the machines are pitching and just catches all the balls in random stupid ways… one under his leg. Another in his mouth. This is not funny, and even worse, it misses the point of the joke. It misses what made it funny in the first place.
Here’s the thing. All this movie had to do was repeat the same ideas as the first film. Repeat the same jokes. Give us the same character. And keep the female character alive. These things seem like no brainers, and yet somehow the movie missed the mark on very single one of them. It’s a real shame, because with these legacy sequels (and now we have a new one with Liam Neeson’s Naked Gun, which actually dues get it right,) all you really have to do is be faithful to the original film. Maintain the same jokes and tone. Take some time to figure out what worked about that first movie and why people like it so much before writing the second one. It really seems like Happy Gilmore 2 did not do these things, and wound have been a hell of a lot better if it had.