Wait a minute. That’s not a golf club shaped like a hockey stick. That’s a golf club shaped like a golf club! This is an outrage! You call this a sequel to Happy Gilmore?!?
While I nurse this mortal wound, you can watch the first trailer for the much-anticipated Happy Gilmore 2, in which Adam Sandler reprises his role as a hockey burnout turned golf prodigy who takes the PGA by storm. Nearly 30 years after the original film helped turn Sandler from Saturday Night Live breakout to full-fledged movie star, Sandler has made a follow-up for Netflix.
Besides Sandler, Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, and Ben Stiller are all returning to their characters from the initial movie. This new cast also features professional golfer John Daly, NFL player Travis Kelce, Sandlers’ real-life daughters Sadie and Sunny, and AEW pro wrestler Maxwell Jacob Friedman. Quite a diverse group, indeed.
So, it seems like you’ve got the gist of the movie. Is there anything else that would make you want to watch it? I’d at least like some confirmation that Happy uses a golf club shaped like a hockey stick at some point, but maybe that’s just me.
Happy Gilmore 2 premieres on Netflix on July 25.
The 10 Worst Movies of the Last Ten Years (2015-2024)
10. The Happytime Murders (2018)
Brian Henson’s raunchy puppet comedy features a lot of graphic humor aimed at immature adults, but no one involved really thought beyond “Well it’d be kind of funny to see puppets in an edgy comedy with a lot of sex jokes.” As a result, there’s nothing else to it. If you are ever at bar trivia and the question is “In what movie did Melissa McCarthy bite a puppet on the penis?” the answer is The Happytime Murders. (If they ask for the movie where Joel McHale stares at a puppet’s vagina in a spoof of a classic scene from Basic Instinct, the answer is also The Happytime Murders.) The only person who comes out of this looking good is Maya Rudolph. She sells a rice pilaf joke. Rice pilaf! That woman is a hero.
Colin Trevorrow followed Jurassic World with this massive and baffling bomb, the rare movie that combines magical realism and child abuse. It’s also a Christ parable about a magical, godlike being who died so that his horrible mess of a mother could kill a guy and adopt her abused stepdaughter. It’s also a warning about the dangers of apathy, a message it expresses through a dead supergenius child teaching his mother how to become a master assassin from beyond the grave, and it treats this ludicrous premise with absolute seriousness. (Those are all things that happen in The Book of Henry, I swear.)
8. Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)
In Space Jam: A New Legacy, Warner Bros. depicted itself as a soulless collection of IP controlled by an evil algorithm, truly a Hall of Fame cinematic self-own. And the film as a whole was so feeble and unfunny it made the first Space Jam look like 2001: A Space Odyssey. LeBron James isn’t a terrible actor — he’s no worse in the lead than Michael Jordan was in the original film — but almost everything else about A New Legacy was an embarrassment from top to bottom. It doesn’t even seem to understand the appeal of the Looney Tunes, and Bugs Bunny in particular, who A New Legacy turned into a whiny mope. My advice: Watch a few Looney Tunes Cartoons on Max instead. Any random short has at least five times as many laughs as this entire two-hour feature. Plus, the animation is better.
7. Dirty Grandpa (2016)
Dirty Grandpa works on the same half-baked comedic principle as The Happytime Murders: If someone the audience associates with sweetness and innocence (puppets, grandpas) says something filthy, that is automatically funny. And indeed, if the very concept of Robert De Niro saying words like “smegma” makes you laugh, then you’ll love Dirty Grandpa. But if you prefer your comedy to contain actual jokes (or to not contain non-stop homophobia), you will be sorely disappointed. On the plus side, the title is accurate.
6. Marmaduke (2022)
If there is an uglier, less visually appealing animated movie than Marmaduke, I have never encountered it. And I pray I never do. In general, this has the look and feel of something that was made as part of a money laundering scheme, or one of those bizarre deals where the rights to a project will lapse unless the producers make something — anything — by a deadline.
And yet despite the absolute hideousness of the animation, Marmaduke features the voice talents of many legitimately funny, famous people, including J.K. Simmons, David Koechner, and Pete Davidson. Did they not read the script? Were they not shown images of the hideous characters they would be playing? Were they each given a private Caribbean island in exchange for their services? How did this happen? Marmaduke is pure, unmitigated dreck. I would not wish it on the kids on my school bus who used to bully me by inventing songs about how I picked my boogers — which, come to think of it, was more creative than this Marmaduke.
5. Madame Web (2024)
Like a lot of pre-Marvel Studios Marvel movies, Madame Web seems vaguely embarrassed to be based on a superhero comic. The same goes for Dakota Johnson, who plays the title character — although can you technically call someone a title character if said character never actually goes by the name mentioned in the title? Johnson plays Cassie Webb; no one onscreen ever calls her “Madame Web.” With one very brief exception, she never wears a superhero costume in the film, either. Like I said, everyone looks a little ashamed of what they’re doing. (Under the circumstances, that’s not an unreasonable reaction.)
Silly, bizarre, borderline incomprehensible at times, it makes The Amazing Spider-Man look like Spider-Man 2. But can you imagine what it would be like to watch it with Kevin Feige? That would be fun.
4. The Emoji Movie (2017)
I can imagine a thought-provoking film about smartphone culture, perhaps even delving into emojis, but it would need a script brimming with sharp wit and bite, far beyond what was presented in “The Emoji Movie”. While there’s a faintly optimistic message about accepting diversity tucked within, that movie is essentially the epitome of what you’d expect from a film studio whose financial health hinges on selling tens of millions of smartphones annually: A thinly veiled advertisement that insinuates that owning a cell phone can boost your popularity and make you irresistible to girls. Yuck.
3. Artemis Fowl (2020)
When the Covid pandemic first began approximately 65 years ago, Disney quickly delayed all of its 2020 blockbusters — except for Artemis Fowl, which they instead pushed directly to streaming on Disney+. In hindsight, that should have been a red flag. This adaptation of a popular young adult book series crams about ten novels worth of material into 90 minutes of movie, and the results are incomprehensible and borderline unwatchable. (If you can explain how Josh Gad’s character went from breaking into Artemis Fowl’s house to teaming up with him to stop another character without any dialogue exchanged between the two of them you are a smarter person than I.) It takes a very special kind of bad streaming movie to make you feel like you got ripped off when you paid nothing beyond your existing subscription price, but Artemis Fowl pulled it off.
2. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)
This notorious horror cheapie loosely based on the classic A.A. Milne book, which recently entered into the public domain — thus allowing derivative ripoffs like this one to exist — doesn’t work at all as a slasher film or as a satire of children’s literature. The only way it does work, ironically, is as a very perverse argument against the concept of a public domain. (If copyright protection prevents junk like this from getting made and foisted on the unsuspecting public … maybe it’s not such a bad thing?) Blood and Honey is an unspeakable pile of pooh.
1. Dolittle (2020)
You know the scene in Tim Burton’s Batman where a back-alley doctor tries to repair Jack Napier’s chemically-scarred face, and he accidentally gives him the hideously scarred visage of the Joker? Dolittle is like the movie version of that; an unpleasant, incoherent mess that feels like it was stitched together from outtakes and reshoots of something that used to look totally different. What had started as a presumably more serious affair was turned into a cinematic Frankenstein’s monster of poop jokes, fart jokes, itchy butt jokes, talking animals, wonky CGI, and Robert Downey Jr. going so big and broad he makes Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow look like an introvert.
