Happy Gilmore 2 continues this Adam Sandler character’s fictional golf legacy from the first film. This time around offers more of the same stuff we’ve come to expect from his comedies: crude language, wacky violence and plenty of sexual references. Family friendly? We’ll call a bogey on that one.
The problem with ending your movie with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone” is that Wednesday eventually comes around.
And for Happy Gilmore, Wednesday brought a whole lot of pain.
Sure, he and Virginia got married, they had five kids and continued to win big on the golf scene. But all it takes is a single bad drive to make everything land right in the rough. In Happy’s case, that fateful miscue smashed right into Virginia’s head, killing her.
That’s why, more than a decade later, Happy still hasn’t picked up a golf club; it’s why the bills piled up, he lost grandma’s house, and he became a bumbling alcoholic sneaking drinks while working at the grocery store.
Maybe it’s why Happy threw Frank Manatee in the lobster tank for asking him if he wanted to join his hip new golf industry that’s threatening to put “traditional golf” out of business. For a guy named Happy, he’s anything but.
Still, despite his failings, he loves his children. And his only daughter, Vienna, is really good at ballet—so good, in fact, that the prestigious Paris Opera Ballet School is saving a slot for her so she come attend. The problem? It costs $75,000 a year.
Happy looks at the oversized checks he earned from his golfing glory days, stashed away in the attic as mementos. If he could get back into the swing of things, perhaps he could earn enough to give his daughter the education she deserves …
Of course, that’ll only work if Frank Manatee’s hip new ideas don’t destroy traditional golf as we know it.
Happy loves his children, and when he realizes getting back into golfing is the only way to provide for his daughter, he takes up the sport once again. Still, it takes him some time to overcome his alcoholism. Despite that bumpy journey, though, his children all find ways to support him through his recovery.
When one of his sons tries to encourage Vienna by saying, “One of us kids has to amount to something,” Happy quickly reassures his children that all of them are “something—something to me.”
A man helps Happy overcome his guilt for accidentally killing his wife. He tells him that he, too, struggled with the weight of the anger Happy feels toward himself. But by letting it go, he was able to live with himself once again. That rather quick pep talk solves Happy’s decade of grief almost immediately.
When Happy sees a man treat a busboy poorly, Happy hires the busboy to be his caddy.
We see some characters who’ve passed away wave goodbye to Happy from the sky. Frank lowers himself onto a stage while wearing angel wings.
A man exclaims into the air, “Thank you Jesus.” A commentator says, “The only possible conclusion [to explain Happy’s golfing return] is that Happy Gilmore has reached an agreement of some kind with Satan, aka, the devil.”
Happy goes to his “happy place” a couple of times: envisioning his wife in revealing lingerie holding pitchers of beer. Happy’s adult sons flash their bare rears at him (and the camera) a couple of times. We also see the naked backsides of a couple other men, too. We see another completely unclothed guy, his front strategically covered by a stack of pancakes. Men are seen shirtless, and one man grabs at his own nipples. We see a woman in a bikini. Vienna occasionally appears in a sports bra.
Someone lauds a location’s service for having free porn on demand. Happy makes some money advertising condoms, pointing to his kids in the background as a warning. When they’re grown, his sons discuss enjoying their jobs, and we cut to watch as each of them hold a variety of objects between their legs to imitate male genitalia. A woman smacks a man on the rear to congratulate him. A man and woman kiss.
We hear a variety of crude verbal references to sex, including specific topics such as ejaculation, genitalia, sexual frustration and wet dreams. Someone confuses the worlds “tentacles” and “testicles” when describing an octopus. The explicit song “Get Low” by Lil Jon plays in the background of a scene. Someone wants to go to the restaurant Hooters to celebrate a victory. One golfer is desperate to make others laugh with poorly timed “That’s what she said!” jokes.
Someone falls into a pond full of alligators and gets eaten alive (we don’t see any blood or gore). One person throws hot coffee on a man, leaving him permanently scarred. A woman who’s been mistakenly buried alive calls for help from her coffin, but the men who hear her merely walk away.
We see an X-ray of a man who had a shoe shoved up his rear. Someone else complains that a fork went up his backside. In true Adam Sandler fashion, we see a few men take shots to the crotch. Men “strengthen” themselves by allowing baseball pitching machines to pelt them with baseballs. Someone willingly gets hit by golf balls, and later, a punch to the face.
Happy’s sons beat other golfers with their fists and clubs. Happy fistfights and slams a man’s head into a gravestone. Frank gets pinched by lobsters. A golf cart explodes. Another man’s happy place involves painting honey on a bully so that a bear attacks him.
As mentioned above, we also hear about the tragic golf shot that claimed Happy’s wife’s life.
We hear the f-word paired with “mother” once; the same expletive is partially spoken before being cut off in another usage. The s-word is used nearly 25 times. “A–,” “b–ch,” “d–n” and “h—” are all spoken about 10 to 20 times each. “P-ss,” “t-tties” and “d-ck” are used, too. God’s name is taken in vain more than 25 times, including six instances where it’s paired with “d–n.” We see a couple of crude hand gestures.
Happy becomes an alcoholic, and we often see him stumbling about inebriated. He drinks from a variety of household objects that hide liquor within them. Other men happily drink hand sanitizer and mouthwash.
A man smokes a pipe. Someone asks if a woman is high.
Happy once again imagines his “happy place,” which this time depicts him sitting on a toilet while scrolling on his phone.
Men urinate in public (one into a mailbox), and we see their streams of urine (but nothing anatomical). Virginia yells at her son to not urinate on a Slip ‘N Slide. A bird defecates on a golf ball.
A man’s foul-smelling breath is a reoccurring joke throughout the film, which one person describes as “midnight booty breath.” We eventually see his tongue, which is rotting away.
When reviving an old classic, a good metric by which to judge the sequel involves counting how many cameos and callbacks they stuff into the reboot. More often than not, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the quality of the movie and the number of those references.
That’s probably the strangest part of Happy Gilmore 2, which brings back virtually every living character who appeared in the first movie. In case you forgot who they were, don’t worry; the movie reminds you by replaying clips from the original. And if those characters have since passed away, you can be sure there’s a son who’ll introduce himself to Happy.
After the fifth or tenth instance of this, you get the feeling that the movie’s constantly prodding you in the side, begging you to flip through its high school yearbook while saying, “Hey, you remember how funny I was 30 years ago?” (You can listen to our podcast episode on how movies use nostalgia to influence viewers here.)
Many of the content issues here, likewise, are callbacks to the original film: the “using-the-inanimate-object-to-imitate-male-genitals” joke, the “lingerie-clad woman in the happy place” goof, the return of the ferocious pond gators. But if you haven’t seen the first movie (or your average Adam Sandler comedy), you can expect plenty of crude language, sexual jokes and wacky violence, all of which keep this sequel from scoring a Happy Gilmore-style hole in one.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He’s also an avid cook. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
