Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kyle Mooney
Starring: Rachel Zegler, Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison, Fred Durst, Alicia
Silverstone, Tim Heidecker
With so many people obsessed with conspiracy theories like "chemtrails"
and tracking chips in vaccines, it's easy to think we're currently living
in the dumbest moment in the history of civilisation. But some of us are
old enough to remember 1999, when a lot of people who really should have
known better convinced billions that an apocalyptic event would occur when
the clock struck midnight on December 31st. The now laughable theory
surmised that computers wouldn't be able to update their clocks from 1999
to 2000, and would crash as a result, setting the world back decades and
leading to mass hysteria, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together
etc. Of course, it all proved nonsense, and as we nursed our hangovers on
the morning of January 1st, 2000, we wondered how we had ever been taken
in by such a ridiculous theory.
With his directorial debut, the horror-comedy Y2K, former SNL alum Kyle Mooney imagines that our fears
were well founded, that computers didn't just crash but turned against us.
It seems like such an obvious idea for a movie that we can't help but
wonder how it took a quarter of a century for someone to realise it.
Well, great idea it might be, but Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter struggle to flesh out a movie around the hook. Their focus is nerdy
high-schooler Eli (Jaeden Martell), who harbours a crush on his school's most
popular girl, Laura (Rachel Zegler). Sharing his interest in all
things tech, Laura is friendly with Eli, but that's as far as it
goes.
On New Year's Eve 1999, Eli resigns himself to spending the night with
his best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) watching a rented VHS of Junior. But then Danny convinces Eli to tag along to a nearby party where
Laura is in attendance. Some American Pie shenanigans occur but are interrupted when the machines and
gadgets in the home come to life at midnight and start attacking the
guests.
This massacre is easily the highlight of Y2K, surprisingly gory for a movie that had set itself up as leaning far
more towards comedy than horror in its early scenes. But once our young
leads flee the house the movie finds itself uncertain of its next steps.
There's a lot of just hanging around as characters debate what's
happening, and we get some exposition dumps courtesy of videos made by
our would-be mechanical overlords. There's a neat concept of
Transformers-like robots assembling themselves by attaching every piece
of tech they come across, with some old school effects reminiscent of
the Japanese cyberpunk classic Tetsuo.
For too much of Y2K, the robo-apocalypse takes a back seat as the movie focusses on the
will-they-won't-they dynamic between Eli and Laura. The problem is,
there's never so much of a hint that Laura has the slightest romantic
yearning for Eli, and Martell and Zegler are thoroughly unconvincing as
would-be teen lovers (if anything their relationship is more like that
of a sister and brother) and they struggle to generate any
chemistry.
Y2K might have been more engaging had it focussed on the bromance
between Eli and Danny. Unlike the romantic relationship between Eli and
Laura, Eli and Danny's friendship is easy to buy into. Like a
fresh-faced Kiwi John Belushi, Dennison is a whirlwind of chaos, injecting some much needed energy
every time Danny is on screen. During the party, Danny cruelly
humiliates Eli in front of some "cool kids," and had the movie focussed
on whether Eli and Danny could patch up their wounded friendship rather
than if Eli might get a snog off Laura, it likely would have been a lot
more watchable.
As you might expect, Y2K is laden with cheap nostalgia, hammering home the awful music and
worse fashion of the era. Fred Durst pops up as himself
for a one-joke gag that is run into the ground by the end. But the movie
has little to say about the turn of the turn of the millennium beyond
"Hey, remember Sneaker Pimps?" Rather than evoking the films of that
time, it has more in common with the slew of post-apocalyptic comedies
that emerged in the 2010s, owing a large debt to the likes of Zombieland, This is the End and The World's End. You can tell Mooney is trying to ape Edgar Wright's mix of comedy and
genre thrills, but he lacks Wright's ability to stage action and
comedy. Y2K's biggest glitch is that it's simply nowhere near as funny as it
should be. Much like our reaction to the real life panic that inspired
it, Y2K leaves us shrugging our shoulders and asking "Is that it?"
Y2K is in UK/ROI cinemas from
March 21st.
