Maybe our heroes do become conservative in their middle age.<\/p>\n
Fast facts about Happy Gilmore 2<\/p>\n
What: 30 years after up-ending the golf world, a down-on-his-luck Happy Gilmore returns to do battle with an extreme sports league.<\/p>\n
Starring: Adam Sandler, Benny Safdie, Christopher McDonald, Bad Bunny, Haley Joel Osment, Ben Stiller, Margaret Qualley, Eric Andre, Eminem, Steve Buscemi, Travis Kelce, Julie Bowen.<\/p>\n
Director: Kyle Newacheck<\/p>\n
Where: Streaming on Netflix now.<\/p>\n
Likely to make you feel:\u00a0Stuck in the rough.<\/p>\n
Nearly 30 years after Happy Gilmore \u2014 the slobs-versus-snobs classic that helped make Adam Sandler a superstar \u2014 the angry misfit who once up-ended the golfing world has become part of the establishment, teeing off against the kind of extreme sports league he almost certainly would have embraced in his youth.<\/p>\n
At 58, Sandler is no longer the scourge of film critics and other humourless bores.<\/p>\n
In 2025, he’s a one-man family franchise, an actor with a string of acclaimed indie film credits, and the recipient of the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humour. Perhaps this sequel’s strange, vaguely self-hating perspective is to be expected \u2014 especially from a performer who built his brand playing “rageaholic” man-children.<\/p>\n
The Sandman’s career tension is one of the few curious ripples in the otherwise uninspired Happy Gilmore 2. It’s a breezy and intermittently funny comedy that sticks to the playbook of every decades-later sequel, sending its hero back to zero to lazily rehash the beats of its predecessor.<\/p>\n
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Adam Sandler’s real-life child, Sunny, plays his on-screen daughter in Happy Madison 2. (Supplied: Netflix)<\/p>\n
Having won a bunch of championships, fathered five kids and become a pro-sports hall of famer, Happy Gilmore (Sandler) bottoms out after one of his famous power shots accidentally kills his wife, Virginia (Julie Bowen) \u2014 a narrative swing (pun intended) that teases out a bit of the cruelly absurdist Sandler of old.<\/p>\n
He’s soon in (and on) the drink, boozing, broke and forced to move into a low-rent house with his teenage daughter (Sunny Sandler), a gifted ballet dancer whose dream of studying in Paris costs the kind of money that \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 only a professional golf salary and a movie training montage can provide.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, startup bro Frank Manatee \u2014 played with unsettling facial hair by Benny Safdie, who co-directed Sandler’s career-high Uncut Gems \u2014 is out to establish the Maxi Golf League, an extreme sports version of the game with gnarly, flame-lit fairways and golf carts that look like monster trucks.<\/p>\n
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Uncut Gems director Benny Safdie plays Adam Sandler’s new nemesis in Happy Gilmore 2.<\/p>\n
As someone with no interest in golf \u2014 unless an animatronic monkey is swinging its paw above the hole \u2014 I have to say Manatee’s plans sound like a pretty entertaining upgrade, tradition be damned.<\/p>\n
To crush his competition, the upstart entrepreneur has enlisted a bunch of players \u2014 including Billy Jenkins, played by Sixth Sense star Haley Joel Osment \u2014 and had them surgically modified to out-hit the Happy Gilmore power drive.<\/p>\n