Two years after being launched from the 30 Rockefeller basement, and almost eight years since co-writing his first function, Kyle Mooney has made his long-awaited directorial debut with Y2K. Mooney’s hilarious comedic sensibility, first demonstrated on the Good Neighbor YouTube channel the place he made skits with fellow SNL participant Beck Bennett and comedy author Nick Rutherford, was incessantly sufferer to being underutilized throughout his near-decade tenure at Saturday Night Live. The heat reception for Brigsby Bear again in 2017—which Mooney additionally starred in—appeared to point that the comic may discover extra inventive success as soon as he lastly left SNL. Perhaps he’d comply with within the footsteps of fellow forged member Tim Robinson, one other expertise whose expertise (and explicit humorousness) appeared at odds with the NBC comedy establishment.
Similar to Conner O’Malley, Mooney has additionally had a comedic fascination with aughtie burnout suburbanites, overgrown kids who might by no means escape the purgatory of their hometown after highschool. One of Mooney’s Good Neighbor characters, Chris Fitzpatrick, was a backward-capped 4/20 fanatic with a roll of condoms in his shirt pocket, who nonetheless lived together with his mother and strutted round grade-schoolers to appear cool. He in all probability listens to Creed. It is smart that for Mooney’s directorial debut, he’d heart the narrative round that very same time interval—though not on that kind of character. Instead, Mooney goes for a complete Y2K popular culture nostalgia journey; a horror-comedy that imagines a world wherein the techno-pocalypse of the 12 months 2000 really got here to fruition. It releases right into a world already fixated on 2000s nostalgia; Tamagotchi and N64s swirl by the general public consciousness in a rosy haze of memory—why not capitalize on that?
Led by a who’s who of younger actors (one wonders what number of of them knew who Fred Durst was earlier than filming with him), Y2K facilities round shy teen Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his boisterous but equally outcast pal Danny (Julian Dennison). Going for one thing of a tepid Jonah Hill/Michael Cera dynamic, Eli and Danny try to interrupt out of their standing as losers by going to a Cool Kid get together, the place Eli may get an opportunity together with his AIM chat pal and dream woman, Laura (Rachel Zegler). Though each bullied relentlessly by the baggy-pantsed, Limp Bizkit-loving burnout youngsters—whom Mooney very clearly has essentially the most affection for—Danny finally ends up making his mark on the get together by slipping Eli’s mixtape into the CD participant and rapping alongside enthusiastically. But Danny leaves Eli within the lurch, too desperate to misuse his longtime chum by relaying an embarrassing story at Eli’s expense to the favored youngsters swarming him. On high of whiffing with Laura and being subsequently threatened by the man he thought was her now-ex-boyfriend, it’s nearly a godsend for Eli when all of the tech and equipment within the get together home begins turning the youngsters into rump roast.
Y2K’s kills are sometimes stunning. A dick will get mangled by a rogue blender. Arms and heads get lopped off. CD-ROMs are flung like throwing stars. Yet what’s extra stunning is that Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter determine to kill off main characters fairly mercilessly, barely half-hour into the movie. (One of the deaths, involving a skateboard, is a decidedly humorous second.) It’s daring, however these character absences go away an ungainly, deflating dynamic between the remaining survivors, which embody lower-tier stoner squad members CJ (Daniel Zolghadri) and Ash (Lachlan Watson).
From right here, the screenplay makes an attempt the cliché of forcing mismatched characters to get alongside within the face of dire circumstances, whereas taking part in out Laura and Eli’s strengthening romantic bond. The odd group makes their trek to a location the place they imagine they will climate this apocalyptic storm: an previous, derelict manufacturing unit the place the grownup stoners, dubbed “The Kollective,” hang around. Eli and Danny had simply that morning been invited there by pothead video retailer clerk Garrett (Mooney, doing his Chris Fitzpatrick schtick in a dreadlock wig).
At the manufacturing unit, it’s revealed that Laura will not be solely a fairly standard woman, she’s additionally a coding wiz. She discovers that the important thing to saving the world lies in hacking the mainframe of the unreal intelligence which has created sentient, bloodthirsty robots out of widespread family objects, and who’re decided to assimilate all people into senseless servants. The robots (courtesy of Wētā Workshop) are one of the best a part of the movie, grotesque and physique horror-esque in the best way they construct upon themselves in a mass of wires and devices. But apart from the spectacular monsters, not a lot else dazzles in Y2K. In reality, most of Y2K feels 24 years late and a buck brief. There had but to be a film explicitly made about this worldwide scare; reasonably, movies made across the time interval merely mirrored an analogous kind of tech anxiousness (The Matrix, Strange Days, Hackers). It’s probably that nobody bothered with Y2K movies after the very fact as a result of the premise was already dated.
In dealing with this concept, Mooney doesn’t know the place to attract the road between satire and sentimentality. Y2K is so gratuitously laden with a sweet path of apparent interval references that its fully earnest tone is all of the extra bewildering. Brigsby Bear, one other movie with a retro focus, used its dated fictional kids’s tv program as a conduit for its lead character’s bodily and emotional emancipation. In Y2K, lackadaisical gags about dial-up noises, AIM chats, and rap rock are largely alleged to be humorous as a result of they’re previous, and since those that grew up round such issues will gleefully acknowledge them. It’s banking on this carrying the movie in lieu of satisfying jokes or characters. The characters are varyingly miscast, poorly written, or in any other case unwieldy: Zegler and Martell have unfavorable chemistry, whereas Dennison strains to tug off cocksure. Even seeing Mooney play a well-recognized kind of character reinforces how stale the movie feels. The uncommon but charming pairing of Tim Heidecker and Alicia Silverstone as Eli’s mother and father is completely wasted, and Fred Durst makes a cameo that flops in simply how straightforward it’s—a distinction to his sudden flip in I Saw The TV Glow earlier this 12 months.
Y2K ought to mark the start of Kyle Mooney’s movie auteurism, however his funnier instincts and command of human vulnerability have been changed by weak jokes, weak characters, and a weak storyline. Y2K stretches its joke premise (barely humorous to start with) out to function size, and it doesn’t assist that the protagonists are completely too invested in one thing the filmmakers aren’t taking severely. The 25-year hole separating audiences from the non-event that was Y2K, even coupled with resurrected 2000s traits, solely make this skinny 90-minute movie really feel all of the extra outdated. For a comic who’s partly constructed his profession on wanting backwards, Y2K comes throughout as the results of essentially the most banal instincts of an artist who fell sufferer to nostalgia traits of his personal: attempting to recapture one thing that labored up to now as a substitute of attempting one thing new.
Director: Kyle Mooney
Writer: Kyle Mooney, Evan Winter
Starring: Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, The Kid Laroi, Fred Durst
Release Date: December 6, 2024
