VERDICT: Kyle Mooney’s teen disaster comedy ‘Y2K’ starts promisingly enough before blowing 2000 opportunities for thrills, laughs, or insight.
Alonso Duralde
December 7th, 2024
The global panic over Y2K wound up amounting to very little, and so, unfortunately, does Y2K, a comedy with a compelling premise: What if the pre–1/1/2000 jitters underestimated the disaster, and the Y2K bug instead resulted in self-aware electronics attacking the human race?
It’s a fun idea, but unfortunately, director Kyle Mooney (who also co-wrote with Evan Winter) doesn’t get too far past the idea stage. And while it’s always commendable when a disaster movie establishes early on that any cast member can die at any moment, the film makes a fatal error in killing off the funniest of its teen characters, with only a bunch of earnest Breakfast Clubbers in their place. (Given the amount of cultural name-dropping here, it’s surprising that the touchstone John Hughes artifact is never mentioned.)
It’s December 31, 1999, and best friends Eli (Jaeden Martell, Knives Out) and Danny (Julian Dennison, Deadpool 2) embrace their lot as high-school outsiders, resigning themselves to an evening in with a VHS rental of Junior. But after they break into the liquor cabinet, Danny convinces Eli that they should crash the popular kids’ party, so that Eli might have a chance to chat up his AOL instant-messenger crush, Laura (Rachel Zegler), a basketball player who’s also very proficient with computers.0p
When the clock strikes midnight, the power goes out. Still, it’s not long before the household appliances begin working in tandem, killing off the teenagers and growing larger as they assimilate each other into bi-pedal creatures that share a unified consciousness. It’s up to our high school heroes — along with stoner video-store clerk Garrett (Mooney), Laura’s ex Jonas (Mason Gooding), and, for good measure, Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst (as himself) — to save humanity.
On Saturday Night Live and in his previous outing as a screenwriter, Brigsby Bear, Mooney has demonstrated fluency in absurdity and awkwardness, and the early scenes of Y2K display this skill, whether it’s Garrett’s weed-induced nonsequiturs, or the recognizably fumbling turns of phrase Eli blurts out in Laura’s presence. But once the menace kicks in, the film there’s no real sense of momentum, comedic or otherwise, and its 91 minutes drag out intolerably. The often-muddy sound mix and disinterested cinematography certainly don’t help.
Dennison has stolen scenes from much more vibrant performers, so to say that he does so opposite Martell and Zegler is damning with faint praise. In Zegler’s defense, her character is part homecoming queen and part hacker; that’s a potentially provocative combo, but conveying her inner life appears to be beyond the capacity of these writers.
Once the funniest characters fall victim to the killing machines, about all Y2K has left to fall back on is references to 1990s pop songs, tech, and online interfaces, all of which are served up more compellingly in the documentary Time Bomb Y2K, a much more insightful (and, at times, even funnier) exploration of this moment in history. Mooney has a promising future as an observer of the human condition, but his attempt at exploring genre plays more like a bug than a feature.