By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler and Julian Dennison
Directed by Kyle Mooney
Written by Kyle Mooney and Evan Winter
A24
Given that a good deal of the target youth audience probably hadn’t been born at the time it depicts, it’s a little surprising that the creators of Y2K don’t go into a bit more detail about why that potential computer bug got so many people freaked out. Certainly, as the turn of the last millennium beckons in this movie, its teenage characters don’t seem too concerned about the likelihood of worldwide computer shutdowns and possibly The End of The World As We Know It. They just want to party like it’s, well, 1999.
Evidently, writer/director Kyle Mooney and co-scripter Evan Winter mean to appeal more to those viewers who were around back then and can appreciate the nostalgia-bait of this comedy-horror film. The early scenes drop buzz-names like Enron and Tae Bo, and several scenes are set in a VHS rental store (RIP) called Video MD, among many other verbal and visual shout-outs. That being the case, the creators should have done more to make Y2K distinctive from any number of movies released since ’99 became 2000, including SUPERBAD (whose star Jonah Hill is a producer here) and the suburban oeuvre of Kevin Smith (whose films, like this one, were shot in New Jersey).
For about the first half hour, Y2K is a teen buddy comedy that checks off all the familiar boxes. The leads are a pair of high-school outcasts: Eli (IT’s Jaeden Martell) is the sensitive nice guy, and Danny (Julian Dennison from HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE, DEADPOOL 2 and GODZILLA VS. KONG, who could so play a young Maui if Disney ever does a MOANA live-action prequel) is brash and unfiltered. Eli’s mooning over Laura (Rachel Zegler), a girl in the popular crowd with whom he’s on a friendly-but-no-more basis, and as she’s newly single, Danny insists Eli can make his move at a New Year’s Eve party hosted by “soccer Chris” (Aussie rapper The Kid Laroi, convincingly playing an American jock asshole).
The leadup to the party and the bash itself have a few good laughs, but not enough that’s genuinely clever, surprising or formula-busting. It feels like an act’s worth of pretext on the way to the big story turn, right after the stroke of midnight, when the kids get hit with a lot worse than Internet outages. An insidious force has infected the computers of the world, or at least their neighborhood, and in no time at all the youths are under attack by cobbled-together, lethal machines. Ranging from small combinations of wheeled frames and deadly power tools to humanoid monstrosities, they lay waste to the party in the movie’s best sustained setpiece. It delivers both outrageously funny moment and a few jolting gory bits, and no small part of its success, along with scenes later in the movie, lies with the physical mechanicreature creations of Wētā Workshop, which are persuasively “alive” and nasty.
These metal-wire-and-plastic nightmares rack up quite a body count, including a few deaths of key individuals that we don’t expect. Yet that winds up working against the rest of the film, as we don’t get the chance to enjoy watching how their relationships and conflicts play out once the survivors flee into a fight-for-survival scenario. A couple of characters we barely know must necessarily be upgraded to key supporting players, and as the little group make their way through the hellish night, none are given much that’s memorable to do or say. The key dramatic question, other than defeating their robotic enemies, remains whether Eli will man up enough to win Laura’s heart, and we all know how that one’s going to turn out (and did we mention that it’s established early on that Laura is a tech whiz?).
Y2K also attempts to make some satirical points, via a monitor-borne manifestation of the evil force (which looks a bit like cyber-Jobe in THE LAWNMOWER MAN and sounds a lot like Seth Rogen), about the pernicious ubiquity of technology in our lives. This doesn’t add up to much more than we’ve heard and seen in many other movies over the last quarter-century, and there’s not much in Y2K that really relates to our current smartphone-and-social-media-soaked world. Well before it’s over, you get the feeling this film would have hit a lot harder if it had been released somewhere around Y2KV.
