Happy Gilmore 2

Not being a film historian I just want to tell you how it appeared to me but I cannot swear by the veracity of what follows. 

In the 1970s Burt Reynolds was one of the biggest stars in the world and capped off a hit and miss run with one of the biggest box office hits of all time with Smokey and the Bandit in 1977. 

You might think, given his star power, that Burt would use his influence to make some great movies. 

Instead, we got Cannonball Run, two Smokey sequels and eventually a pretty good (for its time) sitcom Evening Shade. 

Speaking about this period frequent co-star Ossie Davis said Burt just wanted to make movies with his friends. 

And that’s where Adams Sandler’s career has been, mostly, since he had a string of hits at the box office in the 1990s. Outside of the really rare flick Sandler is content to let Netflix pay for his vacations to interesting foreign countries and cut checks to his friends for cameos that mostly don’t do anything for whichever movie he happens to be making. 

For the last 20 years for me at least it’s been notable when Sandler makes something decent (Murder Mystery, Hustle) instead of an unwatchable mess (Hubie Halloween).

Uncut Gems is a heckuva flick but it belongs in an entirely different conversation about Sandler’s career. 

With Happy Gilmore 2 everybody in the first one who is still alive gets to come back (no, I mean everyone). 

There are jokes that work – John Daly made me snort a bunch, and jokes that don’t – just about anything with the evil golf league. 

More of it works than I expected. I imagine my nostalgia for that period in Sandler’s career, and the corresponding period in my own life, carried me along. 

It’s a little like a high school reunion. You notice how old your classmates have become but given how far along in the cycle you are you can just be happy most everyone is still here. 

Sandler made some astonishingly funny movies. Hardly anyone is getting close to The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates. And he’s also made a ton of dreck. 

This is somewhere in the middle. If you have no affection for Happy Gilmore you should skip it. Even if you do remember Gilmore fondly this is nowhere near that comedy classic.  

But, if you do decide to watch this, if you ever get down on it, just look up every time Verne Lundquist comes on screen. 

That guy was having a blast.