This morning I had some time to kill as I was waiting for a provider to finish a job at one of the office so I was just sitting there looking at them so they dont break anything or do anything dumb, decided to pull my tablet and casually watch something, usually this are the moments I kill movies from my bucket list. Happy Gilmore 2, I had no rush at all to watch, considering all the rummors that went around about how this is no contender to the GO one, and I did not expect the turn they take right out of the gate, because they open with the darkest choice possible. The movie opens on a brand new scene, Happy living his life with his wife Virginia and their five kids, and then he hits a golf ball that accidentally strikes and kills her in the first three minutes. Happy spirals hard, turns into a full blown alcoholic, quits golf completely and the movie keeps making a joke out of where he hides his booze, a hollowed out cucumber, inside a cuckoo clock, even in his cell phone. That is a weird way to handle grief, one minute you feel bad for the guy and the next the movie just wants you laughing at how far he has fallen. It turns out very sad from the start, nothing happy though, its just this old man wander around wrecked forever and the only reason he picks the clubs back up is his daughter getting into some expensive ballet school in Paris that costs thousands, but I dont know if the setup feels too simple, it does feel like there is missing something, it just feels off. He ends up working a dead end job at a grocery store living check by check and the whole thing feels sad instead of that loud angry energy I remember from the original. I get how Adam Sandler can be funny even when he cries but this one just feels sad plus the constant booze references felt like it was too much over and over.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31868189/
- Platform: NETFLIX
There was a ton of nostalgia involve on this movie, you might expect Adam Sandler is going to lead the mood of the movie but for me was McGavin by Christopher McDonald who probably had the most impact on the movie, the guy was locked in a psychiatric facility for the last twenty nine years, the dude had this lunatic vibe and still not the villain of the movie. This time the actual villain is Frank, a rich CEO played by Benny Safdie who wants to launch some ridiculous extreme golf league called Maxi Golf. His whole plan is basically to turn the sport into a louder, crazier version and he even pulls some strings to get Shooter out of the asylum. Frank is also stuck with this running joke about his horrible breath, including a really stupid detail where his secret headquarters literally recognizes his farts to let him inside. Shooter wants nothing to do with Maxi Golf and sees the whole thing as an insult to the sport, so naturally things go bad pretty fast. Eventually we get a fight at a cemetery where Happy and Shooter are beating the hell out of each other around the graves of Bob Barker and Chubbs, with the movie throwing in even more jokes from the first one. The fight is actually pretty funny, but then the two just suddenly decide to stop hating each other and team up against Maxi Golf. It makes almost no sense after everything between them, but seeing Happy and Shooter sharing the screen again gives the movie some much needed life. I just wish they had spent more time bringing back their old rivalry instead of rushing straight into the team up, especially because Safdie never really feels right as the big corporate bad guy in a Happy Gilmore movie.
On top of that the movie is stuffed with way too many celebrity cameos that add nothing and just yank you right out of the story, too too many distractions for my taste. Steve Buscemi plays a strange neighbor across the street who literally pees inside a mailbox and does ballet moves in his yard, this kind of ridiculous behavior in my opinion is a waste of talent, Buscemi is an actor with ton of range that can pull off any kind of characer but this one is just too silly. Happy needs a new caddy and ends up hiring a former busboy named Oscar, played by Bad Bunny, one of those cameos that made more noise than what they actually contribute to the story. They bring back Ben Stiller as his nursing home character Hal, who now runs the Alcoholics Anonymous group Happy attends after crashing a golf cart drunk and gets zero funny dialogue, again the dark side. Then Eminem shows up playing the son of the guy who tormented Happy years ago, talks tough and gets thrown by Happys four giant sons into a pond full of alligators, where he tries to fight them before getting dragged under. None of these famous faces add to the humor, they just walk on screen so the audience can point at them before they just gone and eat up runtime and every callback stops the movie for a flashback just in case you forgot what happened decades ago, almost like we didnt know or the director though its been too long for people even know who Happy is. All these random scenes make the whole thing feel like a stack of internet clips instead of an actual story about a guy trying to help his daughter.
Put all this Maxi Golf nonsense next to the simple story from the first movie and it is easy to see where the sequel loses me. Back then Happy was just a failed hockey player who discovered he could hit a golf ball insanely far and suddenly found himself going against Shooter McGavin, a real pro who hated everything about him. That simple amateur against the pro rivalry was basically the whole joke. Here Happy comes out of retirement trying to help his family and his daughter chase her dream, but somehow the movie ends up throwing him into this insane extreme golf league that barely even feels like golf anymore. If you follow football, Maxi Golf honestly feels a little like Kings League, just louder and with the rules changed to make everything look crazier. The courses have ice rinks, monkey bars, fire and all kinds of ridiculous obstacles, but the problem is you never really understand how anyone is scoring or even winning. After a while I was completely lost with the actual game. Then the movie explains that these new golfers can hit the ball so far because they had a ligament in their backs surgically cut, leading to this long story about an old golfer named Ben Daggett and a golf shoe being shoved up his ass over a gambling debt. It is exactly the kind of random dumb joke the movie keeps stopping for and it did nothing for me. Happy never gets a simple challenge or a real rival like Shooter. He just moves from one crazy obstacle to the next while everyone around him acts like a cartoon character, even when Frank openly rigs the final green against him, there is no real tension because the whole tournament already feels made up. Just because on this one they go bigger and crazier does not automatically make something funnier and Happy Gilmore worked much better when the golf around Happy was normal and he was the crazy one.
The final game comes down to a player named Billy, played by Haley Joel Osment and at this point the whole tournament is just complete nonsense, its just the rules, the siliness, the informality, everything that is not Golf and I think that puts a heavy weight on the movie, reason why some extreme variations of well known sports just dont make it. Happy has to hit out of a bunker then Chubbs' son name Slim tells him to bounce the ball off a wall and then we move to this giant mechanical green that tilts back and forth like a seesaw. Happy and Oscar have to stand on it together to balance the weight while Frank spins the thing with a remote, I was like what the fuck are we on American Ninja Warrior or some sht like that. Oscar gets sick, they are passing clubs around in the middle of all this chaos and somehow Happy still gets the shot off, thats when ball stops right on the edge of the hole until Oscar passes out and falls onto the green, moving it just enough for the ball to drop. I mean, come on, before all this Happy also gets Frank to agree to pay for the ballet school, buy back his grandmother's house, give up his car and help Oscar open a restaurant, so basically every problem in the movie gets fixed with one golf bet. Then three months later, while Happy is celebrating being sober, we find out Charlotte had been secretly recording him and he gets arrested for fraud and extortion. It is such a strange way to end an already messy movie. I am giving Happy Gilmore 2 a 6/10 just because there were some stupid funny moments but this sequel never comes close to the first movie and instead feels over extended, loud and completely all over the place. The original worked because Happy was funny, angry and completely out of place in the golf world, but here everything around him is so ridiculous that he barely even stands out anymore.
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Rating: 60/100
