Happy Gilmore 2

Twenty-nine years after Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler puts the jersey back on. Kyle Newacheck directs from a script by Sandler and Tim Herlihy, who wrote the 1996 film, and the shape is the one every comedy sequel now takes: the hero has aged and lost things, the old enemy is back, and everyone Sandler has ever worked with or played a round with drops in for a line. Some of it is funny. Some of it is sadder than we expected. At 118 minutes it is a good half hour too long, and most of that half hour is cameos.

The first act is braver than the rest. Happy is widowed in the opening minutes, and the film does not rush past it. Sandler plays the months that follow flat and slow, a big man in a chair who has stopped bothering, and for a while it is closer to Punch-Drunk Love than to anyone yelling at a golf ball. The film also stops, more than once, to remember the members of the original cast who have since died, and it does so without a gag attached. We were moved, more than a Happy Gilmore film has any business moving anyone, and the reason is that Sandler lets the sad scenes be sad and does not wink at us during them.

Then the plot starts and the guests arrive. Benny Safdie’s Frank Manatee runs Maxi Golf, which is golf with fireworks, a running clock and a crowd that has been told to shout, and Safdie plays him with a salesman’s grin that never reaches the top half of his face. Bad Bunny, as the caddie Oscar Mejías, is the best thing in the picture, deadpan and unhurried, treating every catastrophe on the course as a mild inconvenience. Christopher McDonald returns as Shooter McGavin with all the old teeth and a new madness, and his scenes with Sandler are the only ones where the film feels like a comedy rather than a reunion. John Daly turns up as himself and is unexpectedly good company. Haley Joel Osment plays a rival called Billy Jenkins and gets less to do than his billing suggests.

The trouble is that there are too many people in the film. Professional golfers, musicians and actors from other Sandler pictures walk on, say the thing they were brought in to say and walk off, and the story stops while they do it. Three editors are credited, Tom Costain, J.J. Titone and Brian M. Robinson, and the result feels like a film that was very difficult to cut down, because nobody was allowed to be cut. The old jokes are done again, one by one, and the second time round they are recognised rather than laughed at. By the final Maxi Golf tournament we had stopped counting the holes and started counting the guests, and the guests were winning.

It is not a film that asks to be looked at. Zak Mulligan shoots the courses in flat, bright sunshine and the Maxi Golf arena in coloured light and smoke, and Perry Andelin Blake builds that arena as a fairground with a fairway through it, which is the right joke about what the game is turning into. Jordy Scheinberg dresses Manatee like a man who sells energy drinks at a trade fair, and Happy in the same jersey he wore in 1996, which is the point. Rupert Gregson-Williams’s score plays the grief straight and the golf as if it were a war film, and the second of those is funnier than most of the dialogue it sits under.

Dennis Dugan, who directed the original, appears here as Doug Thompson, and his presence is a fair measure of what Newacheck has done: kept the old film’s jokes, added the old film’s people, and put a memorial service in the middle. Julie Bowen’s Virginia is used sparingly and well. Ben Stiller’s Hal L, the orderly turned counsellor, gets one good scene and then keeps coming back for more that are not.

This was made to be watched on a sofa, and that is where it belongs, with people who know the first film well enough to say the lines a beat before the cast does. They will have a good time. Anyone else will find a decent forty-minute comedy about a widower and a caddie, and a long queue of famous people standing in front of it. It carries a 12 certificate, which tells you how much gentler this Happy has become.