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Well here’s something that wasn’t on my bingo card for 2025. Happy Gilmore 2 is… good?!
I know. I’m just as shocked as you are.
Happy Gilmore 2 follows much of the Clerks III vibe, at least as far as the inciting incident. Spoilers ahead.
First off, Virginia (Julie Bowen) is killed off in the first five minutes of the movie. Yeah, didn’t see that coming. But while the death itself is cartoonish, the reverberations throughout the story are not.
Her death sends Happy into a self-destructive alcoholic spiral and he has to climb himself out and win the day. Ok, not an unfamiliar set up. It’s all in the hips. I mean, the execution.
Happy is approached by a douche bag who wants to create a new Maxi-golf sport. Golf TO THE EXTREME!!!
Happy wants no part of it and continues working at a grocery store since he’s lost all his money and lives in a shithole with his daughter. He also has 4 sons who live together but visit often.
The Good
Here’s the first theme that won me over. While Happy is in a bad place, his kids all support the shit out of him. All trying to help and never once was there that “you suck” moment from any of them. He on the other hand is still pretty devoted to them. He finally decides to pull himself out of his mess by taking up golf again to help his daughter go to Paris to go to a prestigious dance school.
Secondly, he’s well respected in the golf community. He had won the tour 4 or 5 times and when he comes back, he’s welcomed. The pro-golf association is worried about the Maxi-league pushing out traditional golf. He plays in a big tournament to be part of the 5 players that will take on Maxi golf to put them out of business.
This was also a great theme, Happy in the first movie was the rebel against the traditional repressed golfers. Now he’s realized in his old age that maybe tradition matters. Maybe there’s a reason that it’s lasted so long in its current form. Defense of tradition? Whoa.
Third, the douche bag gets Shooter McGavin out of the mental hospital he’s been in since the first movie. I assumed that this was going to be another showdown between the two again but no! Instead it becomes a giant redemption arc for McGavin and he and Happy become friends. Well at least not enemies anymore. It’s great!
Of course it all goes mostly where you figure it would go but I got to admit that it was clever in the final match.
The cameos are hit and miss but John Daly is gold. There are so many and since I’m not that familiar with golf these days, or even in past days, I had to look them up. Happy’s new happy place is now age appropriate and is perfect.
The Bad
Of course it’s not perfect. One, it relies far too much on member berries. Even going so far as to show flashbacks to the original movie just in case you don’t remember that moment or character. It was grating after a while.
The jokes are decent but just don’t land the way the first ones did. However even though there were a lot of call backs, there’s plenty of attempts to do new jokes rather than rehash what happened before.
It’s also got some sub-plots that are a bit underdeveloped. For instance, the Maxi Golfers had some sort of surgery that lets them hit the ball just like Happy does. It’s interesting but it goes nowhere.
Overall
I was really won over by this movie and I went into it with my typical “well, let’s see how this is going to suck” attitude. His sons are hilarious, all basically little Happy’s. But they are fiercely loyal to their dad and sister and you gotta appreciate that.
The daughter is immensely likable. Never once does she reprimand Happy on his drinking but instead just helps him when he decides not to drink. She also doesn’t want Happy to just make the money for her, she wants her dad to be… well happy. Everyone in this family is trying to help each other and that was a breath of fresh air.
The focus never goes off of Happy in favor of the next new generation. It’s his movie. It’s what Last Jedi should’ve been instead of what we got.
The redemption arc of Shooter was great and Chris McDonald slips back into the role perfectly.
I wanted to let it sit for a day before the review and I found it sticking with me more than I would’ve thought. The more I thought about it, I really enjoyed the themes. I wasn’t sure how much I liked the death of Virginia but it really worked to get the movie where it needed to be. Happy never stops loving her and no new romantic interest is introduced, which gave it even more weight.
I can’t believe I’m saying this but it might be better than the first. To be fair, it’s not as funny and certainly doesn’t have that freshness that the first one did. I mean, Happy fights Bob Barker is an all time classic moment and there’s nothing like that here.
But while it updates old jokes fairly well, it’s the story and themes that I appreciated the most. I think it’s far better than it deserves to be.
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