Happy Gilmore 2
Review: I wanted so badly to like this movie. I think Adam Sandler is typically pretty funny, even if his recent stuff is mostly not great. Stay tuned for ‘Jay Kelly’ this year in which Sandler co-stars and I think will be legitimately great. Anyways back to this movie. The successor to 1996’s hit sports comedy, this film is pretty much exactly like that, just dialed up to 10. This movie made some… interesting… choices that I won’t get into because I don’t want to spoilt it, but go watch it for yourself on Netflix and let me know what you think. I will get more into this in my low, but there was SO much happening in this movie. The film’s main cast features, of course, Adam Sandler, with Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, & Ben Stiller reprising their roles from the previous film and new cast members including Benny Safdie, Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio (Bad Bunny), both of Sandler’s daughters, Sadie & Sunny, Maxwell Jacob Friedman, Ethan Cutkosky, Philip Fine Schneider, Conor Sherry, Haley Joel Osment, & Lavell Crawford. We also get a ton of pro golfers added to the fray like John Daly, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka, Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler, (with those 5 all appearing pretty prominently), Rickie Fowler, Jack Nicklaus, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, & Bubba Watson, and so so many more. Other celebrity cameos (both in roles or as themselves) are Steve Buscemi, Kym Whitley, Eric André, Martin Herlihy, Margaret Qualley, Post Malone, Travis Kelce, Marcello Hernandez, Eminem, Nick Swardson, Jon Lovitz, Rob Schneider, Blake Clark, Oliver Hudson, Becky Lynch, Reggie Bush, Boban Marjanović, Stephen A. Smith, Alix Earle, Ken Jennings, & Guy Fieri. Yes, genuinely all of those people are in this movie. And to give due credit, it really seems like all of the people in this movie really wanted to be in this movie and gave it their all. You could tell a lot of those names, especially the pro golfers, were having a good time here.
High: Bad Bunny was for sure the high of this. He is the only cast member that got several laughs out of me and his comedic timing is so on point. He really is carving out quite the acting career for himself. Another high that I’ll give this film is that it was very self aware. It knew it was a silly, probably unnecessary legacy sequel and went full send into that. That’s worth something.
Low: There was just way too much happening to string together any sort of meaningful moments. This did result in some funny moments, but overall it just felt like a series of jokes effortlessly strung together. Another low is that this movie really took its bits and wore them out. One example was just having the son of a former character (whose actor passed away) appear to play the exact same role of the original character. Another example was Happy constantly having hidden flasks which was a tired joke by the 3rd time.
Rating: 5.5/10 (keep in mind a 5.5 is not good on my scale)
Rec: Between this and ‘F1’ fans of boring sports who want sports movies featuring a lot of real athletes & figures from the sports have like two whole options to choose from! But go watch ‘F1,’ it’s way better than this. Worth seeing in the theater if you get a chance.
