I was admittedly nervous about Y2K, the former Saturday Night Live cast member Kyle Mooney’s feature directorial debut, as the once prosperous SNL-to-feature film pipeline has run dry in recent years; from the Please Don’t Destroy boys’ throwaway Peacock film to Pete Davidson’s King of Staten Island, the show’s sketch artists have struggled to expand their schtick to fill more than five minutes. But Mooney, who built a loyal YouTube following in the 2000s with his sketch group Good Neighbor before spending nine years on a show that rarely knew how to properly wield his talents, has long demonstrated the awkward comic sensibility and just plain weirdness to pull it off. Y2K, a disaster comedy co-written with Evan Winter and produced by A24, is a promising if wildly uneven debut that banks heavily, often successfully, on Mooney’s penchant for late 90s nostalgia.
The turn-of-the-century details are so thick and lovingly deployed, in fact, that you’d be forgiven for initially mistaking the movie as a charming if tongue-in-cheek coming-of-age portrait; the opening shots are a very accurately rendered (as far as this mid-2000s AIM user can tell) AOL dial-up computer screen, all pixelated images, slow downloads and chat windows. The film is a constant whack-a-mole of references that, for the nostalgia prone, are a fun game of I Spy: Edwin McCain, Green Day, a Warped Tour 99 sticker, That 70s Show, the macarena, Enron, a rainstick. Alicia Silverstone plays a mom.
True to genre form, Eli (an endearing Jaeden Martell), is a loser crushing hard on the pretty popular girl, Laura (West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler), whose life revolves around his computer and his best friend, the uproarious Danny (Hunt for the Wilderpeople’s Julian Dennison, a true delight). It’s New Year’s Eve, 1999, and the two have no plans. Their only potential hang is their friend from the video store, a white guy with blond dreads named Garrett (Mooney, in peak SoCal stoner form).
So the duo impulsively crash a New Year’s Eve party hosted by “Soccer Chris” (The Kid Laroi), with plastic bottles full of vodka and a mix CD. Mooney has a knack for capturing the electricity of mass intoxication and the nascent art of recording it. His switching between mediums – slick cinematography by Bill Pope, flat lighting by camcorder – recalls the seamless, piercingly accurate nostalgia work done in films such as Eighth Grade and new Sundance darling Dìdi.
Whereas those films went for understated authenticity, Y2K only dials up – once the clock strikes midnight, all bets are off, as is the power. In this extremely exaggerated vision of the Y2K bug, the change in millennium ignites a bloody rebellion by murderous gadgets, who assemble into giant robot collages of keyboard and monitors. Y2K is billed as a “disaster comedy”, but the squeamish should know that that comes with a gratuitous amount of cartoonish gore as the electronics go beserk and sadistic (microwaved heads, etc) The deaths are quick, merciless, gruesome and hard to get over, given the relative grounded sweetness of the first half hour. The rest of the film is a tonal hopscotch of violent survival and jokes as Eli, computer hacker Laura, nu-metalhead Ash (Lachlan Watson) and aspiring Wu-Tang member CJ (Daniel Zolghadri) hunt the mainframe to save the world, with help from Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, playing himself.
The bloody computer overlord apocalypse is a massive leap that lands the film in the murky terrain of fun dumb, frustrating dumb and just plain incoherent, its attempts at heart brutally undercut by deaths played for laughs. When it works, particularly and almost exclusively in the terrain of nostalgia or Mooney being Mooney, Y2K prompts some real guffaws; besides that, at least for me, some serious prayers for relief from severed limbs. As expected with the sketch-to-feature switch, the bit wears thin, even at a brisk 90 minutes, though Durst capably carries a very silly, in a half-good way, conclusion.
Mooney has long excelled at faux seriousness, and Y2K may be one of the most faux-serious crises in pop culture history; the combination here is proof of concept for Mooney’s feature film chops as a director. Perhaps less so as a writer, given the jarring and ill-advised elimination of one character in particular, though maybe that’s a matter of taste. Mooney and Winter’s horror comedy may be all over the place, and unserious to its own detriment, but at least they commit to the bit.
Y2K is screening at the SXSW festival and will be released later this year
