Just plain stupid

Rating: 4/10 (17 July 2012)

I'm not sure why I put myself through crappy comedies that I know very well going in will be crappy. I can't imagine why I subject myself to that. Maybe it's my own sick form of punishment. Maybe I hold on to a little hope that the film might be good. I don't know, but with Happy Gilmore I got exactly what I was expecting. It's a stupid, goofy, brainless comedy that has all of the cheapest and lamest kinds of jokes rolled up together in a big ball of suck.
Adam Sandler stars in the title role as a wannabe hockey player who finds out he has a ridiculously strong golf swing. He uses this ability to compete in golf tournaments, saving the prize money for his grandma who was recently evicted from her home because she owed the IRS $270,000. Happy gets himself into all sorts of wacky situations on his way to the money, encountering all sorts of strange and eccentric characters both friendly and not so friendly. However, the result of all this silliness... not funny.
Happy Gilmore is a film that tries so desperately to be funny. That's all it wants to accomplish. It only wants to make its audience laugh, and that's what any comedy film like this should want to do. But Happy Gilmore fails at doing that, at least for me. It's not funny, only stupid. It's your basic Adam Sandler idiocracy that is just as unfunny in this film as it is in the rest of his screwball comedies.
The film has all the things that make a screwball comedy what it is today. It has a ridiculous plot, unbelievable characters, and impossible character relationships. These are the things that seem to make these kinds of comedies tick, and there is really something wrong with that. Then you add the fact that the character of Happy is a total jerk and incredibly unlikeable it just sets up Happy Gilmore to be a disaster of a film. I may have laughed once or twice, and I didn't hate the film enough to turn it off, but it really is an awful film.