Revisit Happy Gilmore’s golf career after his win in the Tour Championship.

The latest 90s movie to get a sequel is ‘Happy Gilmore’, with Adam Sandler returning for a second helping as the titular unlikely golf star in this cameo-laden sequel. Picking up almost 30 years after Gilmore’s tour championship victory over Shooter McGavin, it follows Gilmore as he has returned in many ways to who he was at the start of the first movie – a drunken layabout with limited prospects, albeit with 5 children to look after now. Faced with a sizeable bill for his daughter to go to ballet school, he makes a return to professional golf to acquire the money he needs, finding that the sport has changed significantly since he left it.

The first ‘Happy Gilmore’ was a daft sports comedy, very much in the spirit of the type of work Sandler was churning out to great success in the 1990s. Since then, he has continued to make comedies with increasingly diminishing returns, ironically balanced with some terrific dramatic work (‘Punch-Drunk Love’, ‘Uncut Gems’, ‘Funny People’) that have shown his range. In ‘Happy Gilmore 2’, he isn’t reinventing the wheel and the script borrows much of what made the first movie so successful, while updating it for modern times – the threat of a new golfing super league is not exactly the subtlest metaphor!

For the first hour or so this is a lot of fun, with enough freshness to prevent it feeling solely like a rehash of the original, and the cameos are for the most part pretty great with lots to enjoy for anyone with a keen interest in golf especially. It does run out of steam somewhat coming into the final stretch, and even by the standards of an Adam Sandler comedy, the final act is incredibly far fetched and daft and I felt my interest waning. That said, ‘Happy Gilmore 2’ is an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.

Rating: 3/5

Directed By: Kyle Newacheck

Starring: Adam Sandler, Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, Benny Safdie, Bad Bunny, Dennis Dugan, Kevin Nealon, John Daly, Sunny Sandler, Maxwell Jacob Friedman, Ethan Cutkosky, Haley Joel Osment and Ben Stiller

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt31868189/