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Genre: Comedy
Premise: When there’s a death in the family and his daughter, who’s a very talented ballerina, needs money to get into the top ballet school, hardcore alcoholic Happy Gilmore pulls out the clubs again to go back on the tour.
About: For thirty years, Christopher McDonald (the actor who played Happy’s arch nemesis Shooter McGavin in the original film) pestered Adam Sandler to make a sequel to Happy Gilmore. So dedicated to the cause McDonald was, that he actually started a now successful Twitter account where he tweets as Shooter McGavin. Finally, a couple of years ago, Sandler said… maybe. With the door ajar, McDonald shoved his way in, and a couple of years later, a new Happy Gilmore movie has arrived. The film debuted on Netflix this past weekend.
Writers: Tim Herlihy & Adam Sandler
Details: 115 minutes
The thing I liked best about Happy Gilmore 2 is that it made me appreciate just how great the original movie was. I actually watched the original right before the sequel, which, in retrospect, was a mistake, as the original is truly a laugh-a-minute experience, whereas the sequel is more of a “laugh every half hour” sorta deal.
Now, I had heard Adam Sandler start chirping about how amazing the script was (the best script he had ever worked on!) a year ago. And it’s funny because, after watching the movie, I see exactly why he thought that way. And how the co-writer of the film, Tim Herlihy, thought so as well. There was clearly a lot of thought put into this story and this character.
But the reality is, Happy Gilmore 2 ends up being the kind of script a bad screenwriter would think is a good script. Let me explain.
Happy Gilmore 2 is, at its core, a deep character exploration. It is about an alcoholic man grieving the loss of his wife and, no matter what he does, he seems to be consumed by that loss and cannot move forward.
It is also a real-world commentary on the complex political machinations of what has happened to professional golf over the last several years. For those who don’t know, the professional golf tour was rocked when a rival tour, backed by Saudi Arabia, poached a bunch of its players and began a competing tour. It threw everything about golf into disarray.
It is a movie about family, about a father’s undying love for his daughter and his fear that, unless he sends her off to ballet school, she will be stuck in this dirty shanty sad town that his family has been forced to live in for the rest of her life.
It is a movie that takes the villain of the previous film, explores the complex psychopathy of what happens when you are exposed to the world as a cheater, a fraud, and a loser, then subverts expectations by turning him into an ally of Happy Gilmore.
And finally, it is a movie about a man who’s fallen from grace – who once had everything and now has nothing – and how do you navigate life when the best years of it are behind you?
Do you see what I mean? If you are a screenwriter writing that script, you are thinking, “We’ve got a winner here!”
There’s only one problem.
THIIIIIISSSSS ISSSSS A FUCKIIIIIIINNNNG COMMMMMEDDDDYYYYYYYY
It’s not Manchester By The Fucking Sea!!!!!!
We came here to watch Happy Gilmore thrust pretend penises in the air and beat everyone up. Not spend 90% of the running time moping around and complaining about how sad he is. Jesus H. Christ.
In Adam Sander’s defense, I used to think the same thing about comedy. I read a lot of screenwriting books and they all said the same thing – that if you want people to laugh, you first must ground your story in deep compelling characters that we care about. Then, and only then, can you layer jokes on top of that that people will laugh at.
While there is, of course, some truth to that, it’s not the priority nor should it ever be the priority in a comedy. 90% of your efforts should be devoted to making the reader/audience laugh. That’s it.
I would think that the people in the Happy Gilmore 2 camp would argue that they’ve done that. It’s not like there are no jokes here. Pretty much everybody besides Happy Gilmore is a goofy outrageous joke machine.
But that’s the problem. We didn’t come here to watch everyone else try and be funny. We came here to watch Adam Sandler be funny. And for some odd reason, he seems to have no desire to do so. Even when he delivers some of his famous lines (“Somebody hit it farttherrrrrrrrr”), he seems to do so reluctantly, as if it might ruin his Casey Affleck adjacent performance.
But the real issue here is one that critically injures Happy Gilmore 2. It is the knife that cut the artery and bled this movie out before it even hit its second act. You see, Adam Sandler seems to have forgotten why the first movie was this juggernaut of a comedy. It’s because it had this dynamite of an ironic setup. A violent hockey player with anger issues is placed inside the quiet polite country club world of golf. I mean, you don’t even have to think to write funny scenes for that setup. They write themselves!
Look at what Adam Sandler replaced that genius setup with. He replaced anger with alcohol addiction and depression. I mean, not exactly a setup where the jokes write themselves anymore, huh?
But even if the irony wasn’t perfect, it’s a tough setup to create laugh-out-loud moments with. I suppose movies like Bad Santa did it well but usually when alcoholics are the centerpiece of your story, nobody’s howling with laughter.
The other critical mistake Happy Gilmore 2 made was that it took one of the greatest single villains of all time and it made him… an ally? Nooooooooooooooooooo. Shooter McGavin is Happy Gilmore’s arch nemesis. We wanted to see what that furious conflict looked like 30 years later. I didn’t want Shooter washed up. I wanted him as cocky as ever. Shooter’s funniest moments are when he’s being a jerk. He wasn’t a jerk once in this film. They TLJ’d Shooter McGavin!
I want to conclude this analysis by highlighting one of the many things that made Happy Gilmore such a classic. And it’s a great screenwriting tip to boot. I read a lot of comedies and one of the main things you have to figure out is what your main character’s motivation is going to be. Why are they doing what they’re doing? If it doesn’t feel important, then the main character’s journey will feel weak.
The majority of the time, this motivation comes down to money. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The world operates on money. It’s a great motivator. But what most writers do is they throw in a lip service dollar amount that our main character has to achieve – say, they have a mortgage payment or they lose the house – and then we just… never hear about that motivation again. It is a paper thin thing that pushes our character into the second act and then, thank god, the writer says, I never have to mention it again.
Happy Gilmore not only comes up with this deeper more thoughtful motivation of Happy’s grandmother losing her house because she can’t pay the mortgage and owes back taxes (totaling 270k), but he deeply integrates it into the storyline. There’s this whole subplot of the grandma having to go to a crappy living home with an evil administrator. The writers even write in fun twists and turns to the subplot, such as the house going up for auction and Shooter MacGaving buying it!
What this did was it kept the motivation present throughout the movie. I don’t see that level of dedication and thought put into the smaller parts of comedy scripts ever. And boy does it make a difference. We’re more invested in Happy winning and taking down Shooter because we’re never more than four scenes removed from an update on his grandmother’s situation.
Believe it or not, I understand the logic behind why all these creative decisions were made. Creative people don’t like to repeat themselves. They like to evolve. They like to try new things. There was clearly a strong resistance on Sandler’s end to repeat an old version of Happy Gilmore. He wanted to do something different. I can imagine him beaming when the writer said to him, “What if Shooter wasn’t his enemy anymore! What if we have them team up instead!?” Bingo, Sandler thought. That’s different!
But I think any screenwriter would be stupid not to ask himself, “What does the audience want?” Sure, sometimes the audience doesn’t know what they want until you give it to them. But, ultimately, especially with comedy, you want to lean into what works about your idea. And there were so many things that worked well in the first movie that they abandoned here.
Happy Gilmore 2 is a weird golf movie about depression. Which means I’m still waiting for my Happy Gilmore sequel. The one where Happy continues to beat people up and takes on Shooter for the Masters title.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your jokes aren’t coming from your premise, where are they going to come from? If you go into a script like Happy Gilmore 2, where the very premise you are building your story on is not built around a funny situation, you are asking for trouble, my dear. This is what the original Happy Gilmore did so well. An angry violent hockey player is placed inside the polite well-mannered world of golf. Boom. You can build a million jokes around that without trying. Why they went away from that goldmine, I will never know!
