Happy Gilmore 2 Was Better Than I Thought It Would Be

Editor’s Note: This story includes spoilers of Happy Gilmore 2, which came out on Netflix on July 25.

If you’re a millennial golfer like me, you probably grew up watching Happy Gilmore.

On the list of quotable golf movies, Happy Gilmore trails only Caddyshack. It’s the kind of movie that aged well enough to where my friends and I would throw it on randomly—even decades after its 1996 release.

One of the reasons it gained such traction was that Happy Gilmore did not try to simulate golf in any real sense. It’s so far beyond unrealistic that it crosses well into the absurd.

Like many Adam Sandler movies, it’s juvenile and the plot is teeming with holes. You aren’t watching for the plot or cinematography. It’s a time to turn your brain off and laugh at the ridiculousness of the proceedings.

When I heard about Happy Gilmore 2, I was a little worried we would be in store for a Caddyshack 2 situation. The Caddyshack sequel has a jaw dropping four-percent rating (!) on Rotten Tomatoes. It is in the pantheon of the worst “sequels after classics” ever made.

Fortunately, we did not get that. I actually came away happily surprised at how good the movie was.

And, for the record, it sits at an ultra-respectable 70 percent on Rotten Tomatoes as I type this.

Coming in with the right head space

Like the original, Happy Gilmore 2 is a chaotic mess by design.

The storyline is a little flimsy, the number of cameos is a joke, the reliance on the original movie is extremely heavy and the second half of the movie gets weird.

But if you come in with the right expectations, you are given enough hilarious moments duct-taped together for it to be well worth the watch.

Hey, this isn’t a cinematic masterpiece. It’s dumb and inane. You knew that before hitting “play.”

Regardless, it was a nice walk down nostalgia lane—with a few modern twists.

The plot of the movie is fairly straightforward: Happy Gilmore had become a Hall of Fame golfer but his career was cut short after he killed his wife with an errant tee shot.

The decision to kill off fan favorite Virginia Venit (wonderfully portrayed by Julie Bowen of Modern Family fame) was easily the worst plot point of the movie. They should have gone in another direction for giving Happy adversity, but so be it.

Having lost all his money after quitting golf many years ago, the 58-year-old Happy decides to rekindle his talents to make enough money for his daughter (played by Sandler’s actual daughter) to attend a dance academy in Paris.

Happy has a spot in the Tour Championship by virtue of being a past champion. He shocks everyone by playing well and earns a spot in a challenge event between the regular pro tour (meant to represent the PGA Tour) and the upstart Maxi circuit (meant to be a caricature of LIV).

Maxi has figured out a surgery to enable golfers to turn farther on their backswings, giving them the ability to hit the ball over 500 yards. They design a course that is mini golf on steroids, featuring totally insane non-golf elements like ice rinks and race cars.

Thanks to a timely putt by recently released asylum inmate Shooter McGavin—he has to substitute in for an injured Brooks Koepka—the stage is set for Happy to win the challenge match on a 1,000-yard finishing hole that features a spinning, tilting green.

Happy wins and the establishment holds off the Maxi threat.

5 things I liked about the movie

In no particular order, here are five parts of Happy Gilmore 2 I really enjoyed.

Scottie Scheffler wins again

Scheffler is one of the five tour golfers in the final challenge. After getting a lesson from Happy on how hockey players fight, he pulls the move on his Maxi opponent. Scottie is immediately arrested, just like at last year’s PGA Championship.

“Not again,” he says as the police officers handcuff him.

And then during the closing credits, a scene is shown where Scheffler decides to spend another night in jail because they are serving chicken tenders that night.

They nailed these jokes.

Even in the movies, Scottie is winning.

John Daly is addicted to … hand sanitizer?

One of the running gags in the movie is that an alcoholic Happy hides booze in all sorts of different contraptions (clocks, golf clubs, phones, etc.). It starts off as funny, then gets unfunny because of how many times they do it, then comes back around as funny once again when they pull off the gag later on.

His similarly drunk neighbor, John Daly, is tricked into thinking that actual hand sanitizer is one of these alcohol-holding containers.

But even when he discovers he is ingesting real hand sanitizer, Daly keeps drinking it throughout the rest of the movie.

Good on Daly for making fun of himself. I got a good laugh out of it.

The pros are decent actors

There are a lot of pro golfers in this movie and I was impressed that most of them had decent acting chops.

In particular, Will Zalatoris did a really nice job playing Mr. Gilmore’s old caddie (and now a player himself).

We also saw looser versions of Xander Schauffele and Collin Morikawa. You can’t get away from Morikawa on the big screen—he was recently featured in the Apple TV series Stick.

The number of cameos is actually entertaining

There were so many cameos that you need an entire guide explaining all of them.

On my first watch, I completely missed that Eminem played a character who gets devoured by alligators.

I was also oblivious that Bad Bunny plays the waiter who serves as Happy’s caddie.

There were more than 70 cameos, making for a revolving door of interesting characters. The chaotic nature of the cameos served as a joke itself.

All of the throwbacks to the original

While it got a little crazy with how much footage they used of the original movie, I really enjoyed the minor details included that referenced the original movie.

When Happy is rummaging through his attic, we see the “beer can hat” that his old caddie wore.

Every key joke from the original had a reference in the sequel. Some might call that lazy but I had no issue with the nostalgia overload.

Overall grade

I give Happy Gilmore 2 an overall grade of a B+.

It doesn’t pretend to be a “good movie” (and neither did the original). The acting is suspect and there are plenty of holes to criticize.

In the end, that’s not really the point.

It’s a nice postscript to the original. There were enough laughs for it to be worth the two hours.

What did you think? Let me know below in the comments.