HAPPY GILMORE 2. One of the many pitfalls inherent in what the movie-internet has queasily dubbed “legasequels” (we’ll plumb that odious cave another time), is that they must, by their very nature, provide fan-service while also reflecting, or at least acknowledging, the fact that time may have left those fans behind. At the very least, decades on, the original fervor created by a cultural-phenomenon-type movie has been refracted and distorted by years (or decades) of real-time existence: Teens become adults, comedy becomes tragedy, everything falls subject to entropy, etc. And so, the makers of such risky, unlikely enterprises face the conundrum of sticking with what works (or used to), essentially doubling down on a refusal to kneel to progress, or making a real effort to bring the characters so beloved of a generation into a new and potentially very different one.
The most recent one-for-one analog that springs to mind is Coming 2 America (2021), a long-gestating sequel I anticipated as much as almost any, and which, in its fervor to modernize the original while attempting to recapture the bright, revelatory comedy of its moment in time, managed to do neither to any satisfying degree. The problem being that Eddie Murphy, et al. seemed to have forgotten that, despite our ability to rewatch these movies any place and time we want, we can never truly recapture the magical transference of experiencing them for the first time, when our young, soft brains could be reshaped and permanently changed by the experience. And changed they were by Coming to America (1988) and Happy Gilmore (1996), among many others.
Where Coming 2 America faltered and ultimately failed was its misguided notion that simply revisiting the charm of the original, with none of its trenchant cultural context, would be good enough. What resulted was a goofy misfire that, in its inability to acknowledge that people and places change over time, was nowhere near as funny or insightful as we legion of fans so desperately longed for it to be.
I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I look to any Happy Madison project for cultural insight. Although I’ve come precariously close to becoming an apologist for the Sandler machine, I like to think I don’t have any illusions about its greater significance or filmic merit. At the same time, though, the Sandlers of the ’90s were as important to the formulation of my comic vocabulary as any, with their deceptive dumbness disguising the fact that they are filled with truly funny jokes and, more often than not, themes of inclusiveness and mutual understanding. It doesn’t hurt that Sandler’s rageful manchild persona, the id of contemporary comedy, was and is so clearly a wounded sensitive in need of community. Nor the fact that, as he’s aged, Sandler has invested substantial time and energy into projects that both elevate and dissect his creation, playing against both his tremendous stardom and the hard-to-parse appeal of his so-often cretinous characters.
And Happy Gilmore 2 (we might call it Shooter’s Redemption) succeeds not only because it is faithful to its indelible source material, but because it teases out one of the fundamental threads (success born of necessity and/or tragedy) and carries it forward three decades into the life of our favorite anti-hero golfer.
After an illustrious run of PGA Tour championship wins, Happy Gilmore (Sandler) finds himself suddenly destitute, the single father of five children and a newly minted alcoholic. Trying to make ends meet, he takes a job at a grocery store, where he is approached by the truly repellent Frank Manatee (Benny Safdie), a tech-bro monster with his sights set on establishing a hot new golf league for like-minded assholes. (Brief disclaimer: I’ve played a few rounds of golf but, as many of my peers organically accept the notion that golf is “just something we do,” I find myself ever more put off by it.)
Anyway, Happy has no interest in Manatee’s Maxigolf grotesquerie and tells him so, quite authoritatively. He also takes the clubs back out of the attic (still drunk) in an effort to find his inner athlete again and potentially make enough money to send his youngest child to a Parisian ballet academy. So Happy finds himself struggling not only with grief and the spectre of public failure (again), but also on the side of “regular golf” in a knock-down-drag-out with the future of the sport on the line. The result being a slightly tamer but refreshingly self-aware iteration on a familiar formula. Happy has passed through the court of public opinion and, now a member of the professional golf pantheon, finds himself the underdog again, albeit in a forum where the practices and standards continue to shift. PG13. 114M. NETFLIX.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in ‘I Am an Artist’.