Happy Gilmore 2 Director defends the shocking scene of Virginia’s death (exclusive)

Be careful, there are important spoilers for “Happy Gilmore” 2 in this article.

“Happy Gilmore 2” is already in Netflix, and in the first minutes of starting the sequel to sports comedy starring Adam Sandler, you may have found yourself collecting the ground jaw after a devastating and shocking touch that nobody saw coming. Well, some of us saw him come, but we certainly did not see that it happened in such a dark and unpleasant way.

In the film’s opening sequence, we update with what has been happening with Happy Gilmore since the end of the first film, which includes winning multiple tour championships, marrying with Virginia Venit (Julie Bowen) and having five children (four unpleasant children and a quiet daughter).

Unfortunately, that also includes learning that Happy accidentally killed Virginia with one of his long golf units. Yes, Virginia Venit is killed by a golf ball hit by her beloved husband.

This is what he sends happy to a spiral of depression that makes the grandmother’s house lose (the one who fought so hard in the original film) and all the profits he obtained over the years as a professional golf. It forces him to move to a house in a backward daughter, where he spends most of his days drinking liquor of stealth jars where he can hide them, such as a cucumber in the grocery store where he works or the cuco clock on the wall of his house.

While female characters are based on a new arch of history for the main male character have been a common trope in a variety of movies for a long time, there is something to have happy to be the one who kills Virginia much worse. So we asked if there was some concern about how that sequence would be reproduced with the public when the film arrived, and we asked director Kyle Newacheck (“Myder Mystery”) about this shocking turn of the events.

Prior to the launch of “Happy Gilmore 2”, we talked to director Kyle Newacheck in an interview that will soon be launched in its entirety in an episode of the /Weekly Film Podcast. During our conversation, I asked if there was ever some concern about recovering from such a dark and dramatic turn. The filmmaker said:

“Yes, I suppose there is a concern. There is always a concern when you are playing with that kind of darkness. But I don’t know, I never worried a lot, because it is the driving force (of the movie). If you take it out, then what do you have? You have nothing real. But when I read the screen for the first time, it’s like page five, and they put me when it happened to me.”

In fact, Newacheck believes that she fits in line with a moment of the original movie. He continued:

“He is not very far from the fabric of the world, because in the first, his father dies. That is tragic. His mother moves to Egypt, and then his father dies, and moves with the grandmother. So there is darkness in the first. There is a true black humor. So I simply felt it (it was) adjusted.”

Yes, in the original film, Happy’s father is suddenly killed in the opening title sequence when he is beaten by a hockey album during a game they attended together when Happy was just a child. While I assumed that this was the moment that made writers Adam Sandler and Tim Herlihy think that killing Virginia in such a way would not be difficult to overcome, I am surprised that they do not see what an escalation is like that simply does not land with the same sense of irreverent humor. Even more frustrating is that a slight change in the script could have done it at least more tasty.

What really makes Virginia’s death feel more sour than he could have is to have happy being the one who kills her. That is much darker than an average accident, and it really didn’t have to be.

Let’s not forget that there is already a rivalry between the McGavin golfist shooter (Christopher McDonald) and the Happy Gilmore rebel. In “Happy Gilmore 2”, Shooter has been in an institution for decades, after his loss of the Tour championship sent him to a mental collapse. It would have been easy to make this rivalry even deeper by making Shooter who accidentally kills Virginia.

Having that death in Shooter’s conscious could have been what sent him to the institution. When he is released, instead of having Shooter and Happy, having a quick cemeteries fight before invented as friends, the film could have had happy reluctant to forgive Shooter, and his anger could have hindered his performance in the course, which makes it difficult to win money to send his daughter to the ballet school. Happy would have to forgive Shooter to properly cry to his wife, and that emotional maturity is what would allow being good to be good in golf. Imagine how moving it would be if happy realized that your “happy place” can never be as happy as before, but still found a way to overcome life.

But, of course, the plot of the film, which involves the crazy League Maxi in the professional golfist tour, requires happy and shooter to join much earlier, which makes the elongation of any reconciliation more difficult to play. If the film had remained as punished as the original and eliminated with all the stupid bells and whistles of the Maxi League, we could have had a decent sequel to “Happy Gilmore”. Instead, it is rawly stuck.