Two years after being released from the 30 Rockefeller basement, and nearly eight years since co-writing his first feature, Kyle Mooney has made his long-awaited directorial debut with Y2K. Mooney’s hilarious comedic sensibility, first demonstrated at the Good Neighbor YouTube channel where he made skits with fellow SNL player Beck Bennett and comedy writer Nick Rutherford, was frequently victim to being underutilized during his near-decade tenure at Saturday Night Live. The warm reception for Brigsby Bear back in 2017—which Mooney also starred in—seemed to indicate that the comedian might find more artistic success once he finally left SNL. Perhaps he’d follow in the footsteps of fellow cast member Tim Robinson, another talent whose skills (and particular sense of humor) seemed at odds with the NBC comedy institution.
Similar to Conner O’Malley, Mooney has also had a comedic fascination with aughtie burnout suburbanites, overgrown children who could never escape the purgatory of their hometown after high school. One of Mooney’s Good Neighbor characters, Chris Fitzpatrick, was a backward-capped 4/20 enthusiast with a roll of condoms in his shirt pocket, who still lived with his mom and strutted around grade-schoolers to seem cool. He probably listens to Creed. It makes sense that for Mooney’s directorial debut, he’d center the narrative around that same time period—although not on that type of character. Instead, Mooney goes for a total Y2K pop culture nostalgia trip; a horror-comedy that imagines a world in which the techno-pocalypse of the year 2000 actually came to fruition. It releases into a world already fixated on 2000s nostalgia; Tamagotchi and N64s swirl through the public consciousness in a rosy haze of reminiscence—why not capitalize on that?
Led by a who’s who of young actors (one wonders how many of them knew who Fred Durst was before filming with him), Y2K centers around shy teen Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his boisterous yet equally outcast friend Danny (Julian Dennison). Going for something of a tepid Jonah Hill/Michael Cera dynamic, Eli and Danny attempt to break out of their status as losers by going to a Cool Kid party, where Eli might get a chance with his AIM chat pal and dream girl, Laura (Rachel Zegler). Though both bullied relentlessly by the baggy-pantsed, Limp Bizkit-loving burnout kids—whom Mooney very obviously has the most affection for—Danny ends up making his mark on the party by slipping Eli’s mixtape into the CD player and rapping along enthusiastically. But Danny leaves Eli in the lurch, too eager to misuse his longtime chum by relaying an embarrassing story at Eli’s expense to the popular kids swarming him. On top of whiffing with Laura and being subsequently threatened by the guy he thought was her now-ex-boyfriend, it’s almost a godsend for Eli when all the tech and machinery in the party house starts turning the teenagers into rump roast.
Y2K’s kills are occasionally shocking. A dick gets mangled by a rogue blender. Arms and heads get lopped off. CD-ROMs are flung like throwing stars. Yet what’s more shocking is that Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter decide to kill off major characters quite mercilessly, barely 30 minutes into the film. (One of the deaths, involving a skateboard, is a decidedly funny moment.) It’s bold, but these character absences leave an awkward, deflating dynamic between the remaining survivors, which include lower-tier stoner squad members CJ (Daniel Zolghadri) and Ash (Lachlan Watson).
From here, the screenplay attempts the cliché of forcing mismatched characters to get along in the face of dire circumstances, while playing out Laura and Eli’s strengthening romantic bond. The odd group makes their trek to a location where they believe they can weather this apocalyptic storm: an old, derelict factory where the adult stoners, dubbed “The Kollective,” hang out. Eli and Danny had just that morning been invited there by pothead video store clerk Garrett (Mooney, doing his Chris Fitzpatrick schtick in a dreadlock wig).
At the factory, it’s revealed that Laura is not only a pretty popular girl, she’s also a coding wiz. She discovers that the key to saving the world lies in hacking the mainframe of the artificial intelligence which has created sentient, bloodthirsty robots out of common household objects, and who are determined to assimilate all humans into mindless servants. The robots (courtesy of Wētā Workshop) are the best part of the film, grotesque and body horror-esque in the way they build upon themselves in a mass of wires and gadgets. But other than the impressive monsters, not much else dazzles in Y2K. In fact, most of Y2K feels 24 years late and a buck short. There had yet to be a movie explicitly made about this worldwide scare; rather, films made around the time period simply reflected a similar type of tech anxiety (The Matrix, Strange Days, Hackers). It’s likely that no one bothered with Y2K films after the fact because the premise was already dated.
In handling this idea, Mooney doesn’t know where to draw the line between satire and sentimentality. Y2K is so gratuitously laden with a candy trail of obvious period references that its completely earnest tone is all the more bewildering. Brigsby Bear, another film with a retro focus, used its dated fictional children’s television program as a conduit for its lead character’s physical and emotional emancipation. In Y2K, lackadaisical gags about dial-up noises, AIM chats, and rap rock are mostly supposed to be funny because they’re old, and because those who grew up around such things will gleefully recognize them. It’s banking on this carrying the film in lieu of enjoyable jokes or characters. The characters are varyingly miscast, poorly written, or otherwise unwieldy: Zegler and Martell have negative chemistry, while Dennison strains to pull off cocksure. Even seeing Mooney play a familiar type of character reinforces how stale the film feels. The unusual yet charming pairing of Tim Heidecker and Alicia Silverstone as Eli’s parents is totally wasted, and Fred Durst makes a cameo that flops in just how easy it is—a contrast to his unexpected turn in I Saw The TV Glow earlier this year.
Y2K should mark the beginning of Kyle Mooney’s film auteurism, but his funnier instincts and command of human vulnerability have been replaced by weak jokes, weak characters, and a weak storyline. Y2K stretches its joke premise (barely funny to begin with) out to feature length, and it doesn’t help that the protagonists are entirely too invested in something the filmmakers aren’t taking seriously. The 25-year gap separating audiences from the non-event that was Y2K, even coupled with resurrected 2000s trends, only make this thin 90-minute film feel all the more outdated. For a comedian who’s partly built his career on looking backwards, Y2K comes across as the result of the most banal instincts of an artist who fell victim to nostalgia trends of his own: trying to recapture something that worked in the past instead of trying something 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