There’s something perversely fascinating about watching a movie eat its own tail without noticing. Happy Gilmore 2, the belated Netflix sequel to Adam Sandler’s 1996 comedy about a hockey goon who discovers a gift for golf, isn’t a good film by any reasonable measure—it’s sloppy, overstuffed with celebrity cameos that serve as nothing more than proof of the star’s social calendar, and it repeats a running gag about bad breath that would have been tired in a 1983 Porky’s knockoff. But as an inadvertent document of how success curdles artistic instinct, how the outsider becomes the gatekeeper, it’s genuinely riveting. You watch it and think: does Adam Sandler have any idea what he’s made?
The original Happy Gilmore worked—to the extent that it worked at all—because it understood something elemental about sports comedy: we want to see the slobs humiliate the snobs. Happy was a failed hockey player with a volcanic temper and a cannon of a swing, and he wore his hockey jersey onto the pristine greens like a declaration of war against country-club decorum. His nemesis, the perfectly named Shooter McGavin, embodied everything the audience was meant to despise: the entitlement of the man who believes that following the rules gives him a moral claim on victory. When Happy beat Shooter, we weren’t just watching a golf tournament—we were watching class resentment get its cathartic release. The movie was dumb as a bag of tees, but it knew which side it was on.
The sequel knows which side it’s on too. The problem is that it’s switched sides without telling anyone, possibly including itself. The new villains are something called “Maxi-Golf,” a startup sports league that’s kept deliberately vague for most of the film—we know only that established golfers regard it with the kind of visceral disgust usually reserved for tax auditors and people who talk during movies. Maxi-Golf is run by a Silicon Valley CEO type with bad breath (there’s that joke again) and championed by a young golfer named Billy Jenkins who infiltrates the “real” golf world before revealing his true allegiance. When we finally see what Maxi-Golf actually is, it turns out to be a garish, pyrotechnic spectacle—golf as imagined by the future idiots in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, complete with obstacles, stunts, and golfing off moving carts. It is, very deliberately, meant to seem low-class and moronic.
Here’s where things get strange. In the original film, Happy was the thing that didn’t belong. He was the loud, profane, working-class intruder in a sport that valued quiet elegance. He was everything Shooter McGavin found vulgar. Now, three decades later, Happy looks at Maxi-Golf with exactly the same contempt Shooter once showed him—and the movie expects us to share it. In a scene of jaw-dropping symbolic incoherence, Happy actually recruits Shooter McGavin to fight alongside him against this new threat. The two former enemies now stand shoulder to shoulder as defenders of traditional golf, united against the freakish outsiders who dare to change the game. Happy hasn’t just joined the establishment; he’s become its enforcer. He’s pulling up the ladder he once climbed, and the movie plays this as heroism.
What are we supposed to make of this? I keep returning to the most obvious explanation: Adam Sandler has changed, and his movies have changed with him, even when they’re nominally sequels to his earlier work. In 1996, Sandler was a former SNL player with something to prove, hungry and brash. Now he runs a production company and can fill his films with professional athletes willing to make cameo appearances because offending the PGA would be bad for business. There’s a scene in Happy Gilmore 2 where the protagonist dines cordially with golf champions—an image that perfectly captures where Sandler is in his career. He has a seat at any industry table he wants. The young man who once identified with the outsider can now only imagine stories from the insider’s perspective. Creating a fictional threat like Maxi-Golf rather than satirizing the actual golf establishment isn’t just a creative choice—it’s a business decision. You don’t bite the hands that host your parties.
But there’s a darker reading available, one that has to do with the strange evolution of populism in American culture. Happy Gilmore was always a populist figure—the everyman, the guy who needed money and wasn’t going to apologize for being rough around the edges. In 1996, his populism meant sticking it to rich snobs and refusing to follow their rules. In 2025, his populism means defending those rules against a new generation of outsiders who are even more transgressive than he ever was. The movie wants us to feel that Happy is still “one of us,” still fighting against some kind of elite—but the elite he’s fighting is made up of weirdos and freaks rather than country-club aristocrats. The form of populism remains identical while its content has completely reversed.
I’ll admit something here that may make me sound paranoid: watching Happy Gilmore 2, I felt a strange queasiness I couldn’t immediately place. Maxi-Golf, with its surgically enhanced players and its garish aesthetic, is presented as something instinctively repellent, a corruption of natural order. The movie isn’t bigoted in any concrete way I can point to—there are no slurs, no obvious targets. But there’s something in the structure of its disgust that reminded me of hate propaganda with the specifics swapped out, like a Mad Libs version of cultural resentment. The same narrative template—freakish outsiders threatening to destroy something pure—could serve just as easily for a screed against immigrants, or queer people, or whatever “woke” bogeyman is currently animating the fever dreams of certain cable news hosts. The film isn’t making any such argument. But it’s borrowed the emotional architecture of people who do.
This is perhaps inevitable when a comedy this devoid of self-awareness tries to recapture past glory. The original Happy Gilmore was disposable fun that happened to tap into real tensions about class and belonging. The sequel reaches for the same populist energy but finds that its star no longer has access to it—not because he’s lost his comedic timing, but because he’s lost the social position that made the original’s politics legible. A movie about an outsider can only be made by someone who still feels like one. Adam Sandler, dining with champions, can’t remember what that felt like. So he’s made a film where the thing to be resisted isn’t privilege or snobbery but novelty itself—where the greatest threat is someone trying to change the game rather than someone trying to keep others out of it. It’s Happy Gilmore as told by Shooter McGavin, and nobody involved seems to have noticed the switch.
Happy Gilmore 2 (2025)
Director: Kyle Newacheck
Writers: Tim Herlihy, Adam Sandler
Release Dates: July 25, 2025
Stars: Adam Sandler, Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, Benny Safdie, Ben Stiller, Eminem, Bad Bunny, John Daly, Travis Kelce, Dennis Dugan, Margaret Qualley, Haley Joel Osment, Rory McIlroy, Lavell Crawford, Scottie Scheffler, Eric André, Jackie Sandler, Kid Cudi, Conor Sherry, Bryson DeChambeau, Sadie Sandler, Nick Swardson, Ethan Cutkosky, Sunny Sandler, Brooks Koepka, Maxwell Tyler Friedman, Keegan Bradley, Justin Thomas, Philip Fine Schneider, Will Zalatoris, Philip Schneider
