“Happy Gilmore 2” is a happy orgy of raucously well-executed Adam Sandler fan service. It’s a pointed exercise in nostalgia, but with a present-tense edge. It’s not some fake update of the clever/dumb brand of slob comedy that made Sandler a superstar in the ’90s. It’s the genuine article, a true revival of Sandler’s Jerry Lewis-meets-rock ‘n’ roll rage. A sequel to his fabled 1996 golf comedy, it extends that movie’s anarchy-on-the-putting-green spirit as blithely as if the original had been made yesterday.
In the ’90s comedies that defined him (“Billy Madison,” “Happy Gilmore,” “The Waterboy”), Sandler portrayed himself as an arrested man-child, the kind of antisocial loser who had to fight his way in. So you may ask: How easy is it for him to play the misfit-outsider today, now that he’s been encased in so many years of stardom?
It turns out to be easy as hell, because he’s such a good actor, and also because “Happy Gilmore 2,” with a script by Sandler and his writing partner Tim Herlihy (they co-wrote the first film), finds a perfect stupido way to take Happy Gilmore, the wannabe hockey player turned golf pro (all because he has the anger to smash the ball as if it were a weapon), and toss him back into the dumps.
As the film opens, we’re given an extended flashback to Happy’s happy ending: He married Virginia (Julie Bowen), the pro-golf-tour PR director he fell in love with in the first film, they had four chip-off-the-old-delinquent-block sons and one lovely daughter, and Happy continued his golf success by winning six championships. He was on top of the world. But 10 years ago, one of his tee shots took off with its usual bullet force…and killed Virginia. Happy was suddenly a widower with five children, and he swore off golf from that moment on. He found a substitute sport: drinking.
By the time “Happy Gilmore 2” gets into its groove, Happy, at 58, is worse than a loser — he’s become an alcoholic wreck, working as a supermarket stockboy, taking nips of Jack Daniels from flasks shaped (amusingly) like everyday objects. He’s got a cucumber flask for when he’s stocking the produce section, a pepper-mill flask for when he’s at the dinner table with his family, and a flask for every other occasion. And he’s going downhill fast. Sandler, in a sad-sack beard, is skilled enough to make Happy a hollowed-out shell of his former self without squashing the film’s comedy. After all, in an old-school Adam Sandler movie, even tragedy is a lark.
Happy, of course, will have his comeback. His daughter, Vienna (Sunny Sandler), has been accepted into the Paris Opera Ballet School, but it will cost him 75 grand a year, so he needs that championship money. He’ll start to play golf again, getting his mojo back in an ’80s-style training montage scored to Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero.” And he’ll step up to the 2025 version of a championship challenge, facing off against a team from the Maxi Golf League, a 21st-century reinvention of golf — led by a millennial sleaze (played by Benny Safdie, the co-director of “Uncut Gems”) with a terrible beard and even worse breath — that reimagines golf as a multimedia experience, complete with shot clocks and only seven holes (so it doesn’t get boring). The Maxi franchise stars have undergone special surgery to separate a particular hip ligament, which allows them to have a wider reach and duplicate the skyborne drive that Happy does naturally. If that sounds both utterly bonkers and bizarrely logical, that’s part of the beguiling craft of “Happy Gilmore 2.” It takes us back to a time when idiot comedy was really built.
The movie doesn’t stint on “Happy Gilmore” arcana — at times, it feels like that film’s 30-year high-school reunion. It’s got alligators and clobbering fistfights (though nothing that hits quite the high of Happy telling Bob Barker, “The price is wrong, bitch!”). It’s got Ben Stiller reviving his sadistic retirement-home aide Hal — now a 12-step guru who leads the recovery program that Happy joins, and who Stiller embodies as if he were the hostile cousin of “Waiting for Guffman’s” Corky St. Clair. It’s got the return of Christopher McDonald, now with vanilla-white hair, as Shooter McGavin, the maniacal golfing star who has spent 30 years in a mental institution but is just traditional enough to join Sandler’s pro team to defeat the Maxis. It’s got the son of Carl Weathers’ Chubbs Peterson, who also has a wooden right hand (he lost his real one in a vending machine). It’s got cameos by Kevin Nealon and Rob Schneider, as well as one by “SNL’s” Marcello Hernández, a sly dog I’ve been waiting to see break into movies. It’s got the sports commentator Verne Lundquist in a paisley jacket so psychedelic it could blind you.
There’s a grand tradition of movies that divide critics and audiences in a highbrow/lowbrow, snobs-vs.-the-will-of-the-people way. I’m thinking of slasher films and Burt Reynolds car-chase movies, of “Rambo” and “Porky’s,” of the “Transformers” movies and most of the Tyler Perry movies. But I’m not sure if there’s ever been a more quintessential case of the split between what audiences crave and what critics turn up their noses at than the movies that Adam Sandler made in the second half of the ’90s. “Billy Madison” was the first of them, but “Happy Gilmore” was the first movie Sandler shot after he’d been fired from “Saturday Night Live” (the NBC brass hated him and wanted him gone — in a way, that was his first slap by the critics). And you can feel his aggression in every frame of it. With Happy in his Boston Bruins jersey, smashing the ball and, at times, his opponents, it’s like a cruder “Caddyshack” with a borderline sociopath at its center.
It would take “The Waterboy,” which grossed $161 million domestic, to put the Sandler brand into the stratosphere. Yet what he revealed in “Happy Gilmore” was something he could never fully show on “Saturday Night Live” — his clown’s uncorked anger. This was ballistic comedy aimed at the peanut gallery, and that’s what the critics rejected about it. I was part of the rejection, writing knee-jerk dismissals of Sandler’s primal geek-goes-wild comedies. Yet when I watched “The Waterboy” a second time, after Sandler had begun to venture into movies like “The Wedding Singer” and “Punch-Drunk Love,” I not only saw how madly funny it was. I saw that Sandler’s desire to go low had always been an aesthetic choice, a conscious embrace of the elemental in himself. He was American screen comedy’s first and greatest cathartically disreputable Jewish punk-rock comedian. In “Happy Gilmore 2,” he still is.