Beware, there are major spoilers for "Happy Gilmore" 2 in this article.
"Happy Gilmore 2" is out now on Netflix
, and within the first few minutes of starting the sports comedy sequel starring Adam Sandler, you may have found yourself picking your jaw up from the ground after a devastating, shocking twist that nobody saw coming. Well, some of us saw it coming, but we certainly didn't see it happening in such a dark, distasteful fashion.In the movie's opening sequence, we catch up on what's been going
on with Happy Gilmore since the end of the first movie, which includes winning multiple tour championships, marrying Virginia Venit (Julie Bowen) and having five kids (four obnoxious sons and one quiet daughter).
Unfortunately, that also includes learning that Happy accidentally killed Virginia with one of his long golf drives. Yes, Virginia Venit is killed by a golf ball hit by her loving husband.
This is what sends Happy into a depression spiral that causes him to lose Grandma's house (the one that he fought so hard for in the original movie) and all the winnings he earned over the years as a professional golfer. It forces him to move into a rundown house with his teenage daughter, where he spends most of his days drinking liquor from stealth flasks wherever he can hide them, such as a cucumber at the grocery store he works at or the cuckoo clock on the wall of his house.
While fridging female characters to spark a new story arc for the primary male character has been a common trope in a variety of movies for a long time now, there's something about having Happy be the one who kills Virginia much worse. So we wondered if there was every any concern about how that sequence would play with audiences when the movie arrived, and we asked director Kyle Newacheck ("Murder Mystery") about this shocking turn of events.
Read more: The 15 Best Sequels To Bad Movies
Happy Gilmore 2 Director Kyle Newacheck Thinks The Dark Humor Is Par For The Course
Leading up to the release of "Happy Gilmore 2," we spoke with director Kyle Newacheck in an interview that will soon be released in full on an episode of the /Film Weekly Podcast. During our chat, I asked whether there was ever any concern about bouncing back from such a dark, dramatic twist. The filmmaker said:
"Yeah, I guess there's a concern. There's always a concern when you're playing with that type of darkness. But I don't know, I was never really concerned, because it is the driving force [of the film]. If you pull that out, then what do you have? You don't have anything real. But yeah, when I first read the screenplay, that's like page five, and I was glued when that happened. So I knew what that feeling felt like, and I knew that people could get over it. You can get over it."
In fact, Newacheck thinks it fits in line with a moment from the original movie. He continued:
"It's not far away from the fabric of the world, because in the first one, his father dies. That's tragic. His mother moves to Egypt, and then his father dies, and he moves in with Grandma. So there's darkness in the first one. There's real dark humor. So I just felt it [was] fitting."
Yes, in the original movie, Happy's father is suddenly killed in the opening title sequence when he's hit by a hockey puck during a game they attended together when Happy was just a child. While I assumed that was the moment that made writers Adam Sandler and Tim Herlihy think killing off Virginia in such a fashion wouldn't be hard to get over, I'm shocked that they don't see how this is an escalation that just doesn't land with the same irreverent dark sense of humor. Even more frustrating is that a slight change in the script could have made it at least somewhat more palatable.
There Was An Easy Way To Fix This Glaring Mistake In Happy Gilmore 2
What really makes Virginia's death feel more sour than it otherwise might have is having Happy be the one who kills her. That's way darker than an average accident, and it didn't really need to be that way.
Let's not forget that there's already a rivalry between longtime golfer Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald) and the rebellious Happy Gilmore. In "Happy Gilmore 2," Shooter has been in an institution for decades, after his loss of the tour championship sent him into a mental breakdown. It would have been easy to make that rivalry even more deep by having Shooter be the one who accidentally kills Virginia.
Having that death on Shooter's conscious could have been the thing that sent him to the institution. When he's released, rather than having Shooter and Happy have a quick graveyard brawl before making up as buddies, the movie could have had Happy reluctant to forgive Shooter, and his anger could have hindered his performance on the course, making it hard for him to earn the money to send his daughter to ballet school. Happy would need to forgive Shooter in order to properly mourn his wife, and that emotional maturity is what would allow Happy be good at golf again. Imagine how touching it would be if Happy realized his "happy place" may never be as happy as it once was, but he still found a way to get through life.
But of course, the plot of the movie, involving the insane Maxi League squaring off against the Professional Golfers Tour, requires Happy and Shooter to team up much sooner, making the lengthening of any reconciliation more difficult to play out. If the movie would have stayed as grounded as the original and done away with all the stupid bells and whistles of the Maxi League, we might have had a decent "Happy Gilmore" sequel. Instead, it's stuck in the rough.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
