Take it from someone who was 15 years old at the end of the ’90s, with the Family Values ticket stub to prove it: Y2K, the new horror-comedy from Saturday Night Live alum Kyle Mooney, operates pretty well as a window into the culture of the Windows 98 generation. Set, as its title suggests, on the last night of the last millennium, the movie opens with a flock of winged toasters — a screensaver image sure to trigger fond memories of hissing modems and chirping AIM messages. Mooney, who was a teenager in ’99 too, otherwise treats his directorial debut like a time capsule of late-20th-century touchstones: burned CDs and VHS rentals, Bill Clinton jokes and N64 marathons, group sing-alongs to “Thong Song” and “Tubthumping.” If you have any lingering affection for any of this stuff, you’re likely to crack a few smiles over the course of the film, though bigger laughs may elude even the target demographic of nostalgic elder millennials.
Mooney and his co-writer, childhood buddy Evan Winter, haven’t just nodded to the pop culture of ’99. They’ve made something vaguely in the mold of that year’s bumper crop of high-school movies, even as the dynamic between the main characters more closely recalls producer Jonah Hill’s later Superbad. The brash cutup here is Danny (Julian Dennison, the young Kiwi star of Hunt for the Wilderpeople), who convinces Cera-like bestie Eli (Jaeden Martell, from the It movies) to bail on their New Year’s Eve plans to watch the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy Junior and instead go to a huge house party thrown by one of their classmates. As the camera whips around the bash, introducing various cliques, you realize that Mooney is riffing on the WB-era teen caricatures of movies like Can’t Hardly Wait and She’s All That.
A significant chunk of the slim 93-minute run time has elapsed before Y2K gets around to unveiling its true technology-run-amok premise: At the stroke of midnight, the machines go rogue, realizing all the fears around the turnover of the clocks that went unrealized in real life. That’s a pretty clever hook, and it’s more clever still how Mooney delays it, as though he were corrupting the story he seemed to be telling with a hostile computer virus: One minute, you’re watching a one-crazy-night teen yukfest, the next the bullies are being eviscerated by a homicidal vacuum cleaner. It would be a shame to even reveal this belated turn if the trailer didn’t spill the beans already.
Y2K is audacious in concept but pretty slapdash in execution. It doesn’t really pull off its big genre pivot. Though the creatures by effects shop WETA have a certain throwback charm (they relevantly bring to mind the cobbled-together mechanical menace of Virus — a 1999 release, of course), they’re never especially scary. And while Mooney attempts to wring some pathos from unexpected deaths, all he really does is give the audience whiplash: This is much too broad a yukfest to get us invested in the fates of its teen heroes, a gaggle of jokey adolescent types like the aggro skater (Eduardo Franco), the pretentious hipster raphead (Daniel Zolghadri), and the popular dream girl (West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler) who’s actually cool and neurotic. The problem with modeling your characters on the freaks and geeks of ’90s comedies is that those characters were already generational upgrades of the Brat Pack breakfast club John Hughes assembled.
Maybe this kind of balancing act between chuckles and screams just requires a steadier hand behind the camera. Mooney isn’t there yet. His action scenes are sloppy, sometimes rather abysmal, and he keeps botching visual jokes, like the one where his own character — a dreadlocked video-store clerk who gets the film’s best lines — squares off against one of the roving robots, anime-style. (It’s a very long setup for the exact punch line you expect.) Too many scenes are sweetened with lousy ADR gags, a real case of subtraction by addition. Really, none of the sudden casualties are as shocking as the revelation, in the end credits, that the film was shot by The Matrix cinematographer Bill Pope. Y2K looks cruddier than anything he’s ever lensed.
After last spring’s I Saw the TV Glow, this is the second A24 release this year to look back on the suburban wasteland of the late ’90s. It even shares a casting choice with that bewitching reverie, the use of a particular (and particularly ’99) musical superstar as a kind of walking cultural shorthand. You could say both films are set on the cusp of the internet era, a time right before the world went permanently, irreversibly online. Y2K, which is like the Goofus to TV Glow’s Gallant, at one point hints at the larger irony of the technological paranoia it pokes fun at: While everyone became worried about the machines malfunctioning, they should have been more concerned about the ways life became totally dependent on them in the years to come. Y2K was almost a quaint fever dream of a world teetering on the edge of a much worse problem, a total digital overthrow of everything.
It’s not impossible to imagine Mooney, a smart millennial absurdist with some real thoughts about our relationship to technology, pulling harder on that thread. But Y2K doesn’t aim for much more than easy laughs and a buzz of “remember when?” recognition. Coming from a guy whose sketches were often too weird for SNL, it’s disappointingly conventional. And coming from the star and screenwriter of Brigsby Bear, which actually interrogated nostalgia, it’s too referential and reverential. The film’s last half-hour collapses into an unfunny, extended appearance by that aforementioned legacy artist — the kind of star cameo that The Simpsons often succumbs to these days, passing off a famous person playing themselves as the height of comedy. By the end, everyone here has just settled for partying like it’s 1999.
