A mixed bag of comedy and horror that never feels comfortable with either genre, Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut Y2K goes all in on nostalgia at the expense of telling a good story. A parade of references and set pieces searching for a greater purpose than what they’ve been given, Y2K takes a potentially amusing and crowd pleasing concept and forgets to include enough actual jokes or scares. While I’m sure a lot of critics will dismiss former SNL performer/writer/content creator Mooney’s film as just an elongated skit, that doesn’t suitably define what goes wrong here. It’s not a small idea blown up to feature length. It’s a feature length idea that doesn’t know which path to follow.
Best buds and high school juniors Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison) are looking to send out the final evening of 1999 in style, leaving their nerdy lives behind and going to a once-in-a-millennium rager at the house of the coolest kid in town (The Kid Laroi). While there, Danny hopes that quiet Eli will let loose and finally ask out his crush, Laura (Rachel Zegler), who just broke up with her collegiate boyfriend (Mason Gooding). But as soon as the clock strikes midnight, everyone’s worst Y2K fears become a reality, as machines start to band together and rebel, killing their human overlords on sight. The friends team up with a variety of misfits – the nu-metal loving bully (Eduardo Franco), an indie hip-hop snob (Daniel Zolghadri), an alt-girl videographer (Lachlan Watson), a burnout video store clerk (Mooney), and a super reluctant Fred Durst (Fred Durst) – to survive the millennial slaughter.
On paper, Y2K sounds like a fun movie, but Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter’s tone is off from the start. The first thirty minutes plays like a wild teen party comedy, which is very much of the time period Mooney is going for, but there aren’t many jokes to be found, with only a handful of chuckles coming and no genuine belly laughs. It’s all lightly delivered cliches, back-to-back pop song needle drops, and pop culture references that don’t have any actual punchlines to make them stick. Y2K’s idea of humour is just to list things off in hopes the viewer will get the reference, and that will be enough for a laugh. Unfortunately, it isn’t.
In a welcome, but unexpected twist, the comically minded Mooney feels more at home when Y2K shifts gears into gorier horror territory, lovingly crafting a strange hybrid of Maximum Overdrive, Can’t Hardly Wait, and This is the End. The design of the hulking mechanical villains is quite impressive in scale, Bill Pope’s cinematography adds a lot of visual slickness, and the pacing has a pronounced degree of surprise and shock at times in terms of twists and sudden developments. The horror stuff keeps the viewer on their toes, but the comedic elements still try to take centre stage, often to the detriment of something that was threatening to become a good movie after an early deficit. Even the moments that straddle the line between horror and comedy – especially some of the kills – fall short because Mooney seems tentative; like he doesn’t want to go too far in either direction.
It’s not a huge surprise that Mooney would want to make a darker type of comedy for his directorial debut, especially considering that he co-wrote and starred in frequent collaborator Dave McCary’s heartfelt, outstanding, but bleak comedy Brigsby Bear a few years ago. That was a film with a lot of ingenuity and a handle on genuine human emotions. The best Y2K can offer up is our young lovers sliding perilously down a hill in a runaway porta-potty set to Brian McKnight’s “Back at One.” The cast tries their hardest to keep things light and funny, with Martell making for a likeable hero and Dennison and Zegler showing off some sharp comedic timing. Mooney has some great ideas and instinct, but it’s missing the laughs and the scares that can make Y2K a success. It’s a film that I wanted to like much more than I actually did.
Y2K opens in select theatres on Friday, December 6, 2024.
