The problem with all those cameos.

I support Adam Sandler’s right to make hundreds of millions of dollars producing fun movies. My favorite movie from my childhood is The Waterboy, the 1998 romp about a redneck who eats fried squirrel in the Louisiana swamps before becoming a star linebacker for “South Central Louisiana State University.” Twenty years after it came out, I compiled the oral history of the film, talking with most of its principals except for Sandler, a hard man to pin down for an interview. I remember Kathy Bates, one of America’s great actresses, calling me a few minutes late and profusely apologizing: “When they told me this was for Adam, I would not miss it.” Sandler has a reputation for being good to people. My friends play a pickup basketball game on the weekends in West Hollywood, and stories abound of the star rolling up with his crew, waiting his turn, and hooping for hours with the common man. In the Sandler Wars, I am on Adam’s side.

That context should frame my evaluation of Happy Gilmore 2. I am not precious about these things. I do not need, nor want, every movie to be an auteur-driven testament to the truth-telling power of filmmaking. I am a golf nut and loved the original Happy, putting me squarely in the target demo for the sequel. I think the greatest crime of the modern Oscars is that Uncut Gems did not earn Sandler any nominations.

Happy Gilmore 2 is not some of Sandler’s better work. Where the first one was a perfect lampooning of professional golf, the second is too cozy with the world it’s depicting to hit the same way. I feared this from the beginning, when I saw who was on the long list of cameos. The first Happy Gilmore was a riot, and in a desire to maximize eyeballs on the second, the producers lined up a bunch of the greatest players in golf, past and present, to make brief appearances. The problem with these guys is that most of them are as dull as a post and aren’t good at acting. Happy Gilmore 2 is not a send-up of a stuffy sport featuring Sandler at the peak of his powers, but an effort to achieve virality by packing as many high-profile people as humanly possible into two hours of Netflix product. The problem with this movie isn’t that it’s not Citizen Kane, but that it abandons the successful approach of the first Happy Gilmore.

There are roughly 50 celebrities in winking roles in this movie, only a few of them (led by Sandler and his on-screen wife, Julie Bowen) actors by trade. The plot, set up by a few minutes of Sandler narrating, is like this: After winning six tour championships, the first of them in the first movie, Sandler has it all—a bunch of kids and Bowen’s Virginia Venit, his extremely hot, loving wife. He then kills her with an errant tee shot (tough break), falls out of love with golf and into love with Jack Daniel’s, and loses everything. He picks the game back up when he needs money to send his daughter to a prestigious dance academy. The general story arc, from Happy drunkenly falling on his face on a municipal course to playing in a big tournament at the movie’s climax, is predictable but fun. We all know what we’re paying for when we show up for Happy Gilmore 2, and the movie’s general structure delivers. Repeated flashbacks to the first movie are a lazy way of catching viewers up on the storytelling, but if you didn’t expect fan service, what did you expect?

Sadly, this ship is weighed down by so many cameos that help the movie get publicity but aren’t funny or additive to the plot. Travis Kelce is the best tight end in football history and probably getting married to Taylor Swift. These are great things. He does not also need to be tied to a pole, coated in honey, and attacked by a bear in a revenge fantasy from Bad Bunny, who plays a waiter. Jack Nicklaus, the most accomplished golfer of all time, pops in at 85 to stiffly deliver a joke about Arnold Palmer drinks. A whole cavalcade of active PGA Tour players blurt out lines with a similar roboticism. At some point, around an hour into the movie, it starts to feel like the entire point of the movie is to satisfy all of these golfers’ agents. (One of the production companies on the movie also makes Full Swing, the Netflix docuseries on the PGA Tour, which relies on the cooperation of many of these same players and their representatives. Hmm.)

In this sea of cameos, there are some bright spots. Xander Schauffele, a golf star I previously thought had no personality, delivers a “that’s what she said” bit with real panache. Will Zalatoris, another pro, does a great job playing the grown-up version of the blond young caddy whom Sandler choked out in the first movie. The producers get Scottie Scheffler, the best player since Tiger Woods, to poke fun at his own arrest by a rambunctious Louisville police officer in 2024. Nelly Korda, the No. 1 player in women’s golf, appears as a parole board officer weighing the fate of Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald) early on. John Daly, a Hooters-adjacent golf star of the ’90s, is a flawless fit as Happy’s friend who lives in his garage.

Some people will like the cameos, and some will not, but the heavy load of celebrity walk-ons speaks to the movie’s biggest problem. Golf is a perfect setting for a Sandler movie, and a ripe target. It is a sport filled with straight men, in every sense of the term, and Sandler is at his funniest when he plays a chaos agent in a world that takes itself just a bit too seriously. The best parts of the original Happy all come from this tension—a hockey-loving doofus upsetting the traditional order in a country-club sport, to the horror of guys like McGavin, who we learn has spent decades in a mental institution after Happy beat him.

That’s all gone in this movie. He’s chummy with the other players. Happy isn’t disrupting anything. In fact, he defends the traditional golf order against a rival tour started up by an energy-drink CEO (played by Uncut Gems writer-director Benny Safdie). This part of the plot could have been a lot funnier if it had leaned into its real-world parallel, the PGA Tour’s fight against LIV Golf, the tour funded by the authoritarian government of Saudi Arabia. That’s fertile comedic terrain. But the movie’s producers wanted two LIV Golf players, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, to play for the “good” tour in this movie. When high-profile cameos are at stake, it’s best not to write any jokes about golf clubs and bone saws. I do not need Sandler to be Stephen Colbert, but when half the movie is about a golf tour’s efforts to fend off a challenger that is clearly a stand-in for a real-world political project, I’d like some edge.

Alex Kirshner

He’s a Generation-Defining Athlete Who’s Never Been Better. He’s Also Profoundly—Profoundly—Boring.

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Though Happy himself still likes to sock people, as he did in the first movie, the movie itself pulls a lot of punches in the name of being as commercially viable as possible. Every Sandler movie does this, as does almost everything on Netflix, but it’s just so acute in Happy Gilmore 2. This movie is an astonishing feat of booking, a real master class of getting famous people to answer a producer’s calls. It’s just not a satisfying follow-up to one of the most enjoyable movies of Sandler’s career. I would have preferred a two-hour documentary on how the producers got gentlemanly golf announcer Verne Lundquist to come out of retirement to read lines that included the words “gangster shit.”

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