For eight seasons, I made no secret of my disdain for Kyle Mooney’s brand of humor on SNL, so my expectations for his directorial debut, Y2K, were not set high. I was pleasantly surprised, however, at how surprisingly funny Y2K is at times. Unfortunately, like so many of Mooney’s SNL skits, it goes too hard on the absurd at the expense of everything else.
Y2K has a promising start, essentially Superbad set on New Year’s 1999 with all the amusing millennial references that come with the territory (AOL, video stores, the movie Junior, Sisqo’s “The Thong Song”). Jaeden Martell plays the Michael Cera-like Eli opposite Julian Dennison’s Danny, who is both Jonah Hill’s and Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s characters rolled into Ned from Spider-Man. Dennison may be familiar to many as the lead in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and he doesn’t get nearly as much screentime as he should in Y2K but he steals every scene he’s in. Eli and Danny spend New Year’s Day ruminating on how to get laid before getting drunk and attending a Y2K party so that Eli can try to hook up with the popular Emma-Stone-like character, Laura, played by Rachel Zegler.
Laura is attractive and popular but also a computer hacker, which proves handy when a Y2K bug is unleashed at midnight, and all the electronic gadgets begin attacking partygoers in the most hilariously gruesome ways imaginable. This is ironically both the most Kyle Mooney part of the movie and the funniest sequence in the film: One character after another meets their untimely demise when, for instance, a mechanical bed launches a teenager into the ceiling fan or when a rolling kitchen appliance repeatedly stabs another teenager in the head. It’s creative, blood-soaked lunacy, like something out of the Final Destination films.
It’s all downhill from there.
After much of the cast has been eliminated, Y2K is left with its least interesting characters, including Mooney himself, an idiot stoner who has a Luddite hangout space where he and his friends smoke weed. The action slows considerably as the disaster comedy turns into a survival comedy, and we have to spend time with four characters who realize they have a lot in common once they get to know each other. And then Fred Durst shows up, playing himself, and the film builds toward a mostly nonsensical finale that involves a condom, the geek getting the girl, and a Limp Bizkit song.
Ironically, Y2K — co-written by Evan Winter — is best when Mooney sticks to formula. There’s a decent and sweet coming-of-age high-school comedy in here, but the absurd horror elements keep getting in the way. He gets a lot of comedy mileage out of ’90s nostalgia, but after the shock of the unexpected horror wears off, Y2K is a completely different movie, a shambling mess that not even Fred Durst can save.
‘Y2K,’ produced by A24, premiered at the SXSW Film and TV Festival. No release date has been set.