Happy Gilmore 2 (2025)

Nostalgia can be dangerous. An overreliance on the past can be a handicap. There's no reason for some things to be revived except for purely sentimental reasons. This wasn't one of them.

This film features many callbacks accompanied by old clips cribbed from the first movie to make you remember how much you enjoyed that one and desperately try to recreate those old feelings. Most of the time, it falls flat.

My other complaint is that comedies are too long nowadays. It's completely self-indulgent for this to be two hours. Clip it at 90 minutes and leave out all the fluff. It ages better that way. 

I sound like an old fuddy-duddy now. I didn't hate everything about it, I just wish it tried to do something different. For some people, same-old will be perfectly acceptable. It just feels sadder when these people are in their 50s.

1½ gratuitous cameos out of 5

Happy Gilmore (1996)

Demonstrating he has range, Sandler's next headlining role had him portraying a failed hockey player with anger issues who channels his rage into his golf game in order to save his grandmother's house from foreclosure. He sparks a rivalry with the villainous Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald), while learning the skills of the game from the one-armed Chubbs (Carl Weathers). The humor in this movie is all over the map, but there are enough memorable moments to cement this as a classic and one of The Sandman's defining roles.

3 fores out of 5

Fatal Instinct (1993)

Carl Reiner's pastiche of 1940s film noir and the erotic thriller genre smashes together spoofs of Double Indemnity, Body Heat, Cape Fear, Sleeping with the Enemy, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. A lot of the reason this works for me is because Armand Assante completely commits to the bit as a completely oblivious buffoon (he plays both a cop and a lawyer here). As with all parodies, it's exhausting if you're not in a receptive mood, but at just under 90 minutes, these films tend not to overstay their welcome. While some of the gags are hysterical, it seems to work better in smaller doses, and it's a bit uneven as a whole. This type of genre has to take big swings, even when it's batting 1 for 2.

2½ traumatized skunks out of 5

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Requiem scares me; not in the traditional sense, but in a very real, unshakable, under the skin way. It has two parallel stories that overlap occasionally. Together they present an overwhelmingly suffocating experience that once seen will never be forgotten, no matter how much you may want to.
If film awards meant anything then Ellen Burstyn would have a closet full of them for her work. Stylistically, it’s Aronofsky through and through - for me that’s a good thing. Watch it.

5 refrigerators out of 5