{"id":1965029,"date":"2025-08-17T08:35:44","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T08:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1965029"},"modified":"2025-08-17T08:35:44","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T08:35:44","slug":"the-problem-with-all-those-cameos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/the-problem-with-all-those-cameos\/","title":{"rendered":"The problem with all those cameos."},"content":{"rendered":"

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I support Adam Sandler\u2019s 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 \u201cSouth Central Louisiana State University.\u201d Twenty years after it came out, I compiled the oral history of the film<\/a>, 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\u2019s great actresses, calling me a few minutes late and profusely apologizing: \u201cWhen they told me this was for Adam, I would not miss it.\u201d 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\u2019s side.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> did not earn Sandler any nominations.<\/p>\n

Happy Gilmore 2 is not some of Sandler\u2019s better work. Where the first one was a perfect lampooning of professional golf, the second is too cozy with the world it\u2019s depicting to hit the same way. I feared this from the beginning, when I saw who was on the long list of cameos<\/a>. 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\u2019t 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\u2019t that it\u2019s not Citizen Kane, but that it abandons the successful approach of the first Happy Gilmore.<\/p>\n

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\u2014a bunch of kids and Bowen\u2019s 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\u2019s, 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\u2019s climax, is predictable but fun. We all know what we\u2019re paying for when we show up for Happy Gilmore 2, and the movie\u2019s general structure delivers. Repeated flashbacks to the first movie are a lazy way of catching viewers up on the storytelling, but if you didn\u2019t expect fan service, what did you expect?<\/p>\n

Sadly, this ship is weighed down by so many cameos that help the movie get publicity but aren\u2019t 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\u2019 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.)<\/p>\n

In this sea of cameos, there are some bright spots. Xander Schauffele, a golf star I previously thought had no personality, delivers a \u201cthat\u2019s what she said\u201d 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<\/a>, to poke fun at his own arrest by a rambunctious Louisville police officer in 2024. Nelly Korda, the No. 1 player in women\u2019s golf, appears as a parole board officer weighing the fate of Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald) early on. John Daly, a Hooters-adjacent<\/a> golf star of the \u201990s, is a flawless fit as Happy\u2019s friend who lives in his garage.<\/p>\n

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  1. \n <\/p>\n

    Spike Lee and Denzel Washington\u2019s Thrilling New Movie Reimagines a Classic
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  2. \n <\/p>\n

    I Suspected Something About Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Watching Their Podcast Only Confirmed It.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  3. \n <\/p>\n

    A Gripping New Movie Has a Terrifying\u2014and Inspiring\u2014Message About the Fight for America Ahead
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  4. \n <\/p>\n

    And Just Like That\u2026 Goes Out With One Final Turd\u2014Literally
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Some people will like the cameos, and some will not, but the heavy load of celebrity walk-ons speaks to the movie\u2019s 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\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n

    That\u2019s all gone in this movie. He\u2019s chummy with the other players. Happy isn\u2019t 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\u2019s fight against LIV Golf<\/a>, the tour funded by the authoritarian government of Saudi Arabia. That\u2019s fertile comedic terrain. But the movie\u2019s producers wanted two LIV Golf players, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, to play for the \u201cgood\u201d tour in this movie. When high-profile cameos are at stake, it\u2019s best not to write any jokes about golf clubs and bone saws<\/a>. I do not need Sandler to be Stephen Colbert, but when half the movie is about a golf tour\u2019s efforts to fend off a challenger that is clearly a stand-in for a real-world political project, I\u2019d like some edge.<\/p>\n

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    \n \"\"\n <\/div>\n

    Alex Kirshner<\/h4>\n

    He\u2019s a Generation-Defining Athlete Who\u2019s Never Been Better. He\u2019s Also Profoundly\u2014Profoundly\u2014Boring.<\/h3>\n

    Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

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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\u2019s 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\u2019s calls. It\u2019s just not a satisfying follow-up to one of the most enjoyable movies of Sandler\u2019s 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 \u201cgangster shit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n