If there’s anyone I’d typically trust to trot out the trappings of ’90s turn-of-the-millennium nostalgia, it’s Kyle Mooney. First on his cult-hit YouTube channel, then on “Saturday Night Live,” Mooney’s off-kilter sensibilities always felt like the perfect synthesis of pop-childhood nostalgia viewed through a jaundiced adult lens: Were the bright colors and plasticine commercialism of that decade the perfect ideal of American culture, or were we just young? Instead of really digging into that question, Mooney seems content to mostly call back the quirks of the era with his latest (and most commercial) work to date, “Y2K”—Tamagotchis, Billy Blanks, song-lyric AIM away messages—in the shell of a crowd-pleasing ironic comedy.
Starting out as a warmed-over riff on “Superbad,” “Y2K” begins gently with another pair of high-school social outcasts looking for one last shot at adolescent glory: shy Eli (Jarden Martell) and outgoing Danny (Julian Dennison), two dorks eager to get into the popular kids’ blow-out New Year’s Eve party at the end of the millennium. After all, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and Eli thinks popular girl Laura (Rachel Zegler), who’ll be there, is fine. For these first twenty minutes, Mooney (in his directorial debut) and co-writer Evan Winter ease us into a winsome, if formulaic, R-rated teen comedy, breezing us through all the big personalities that should inform their raucous night of self-discovery. Ho-hum, but effective enough, especially with Dennison’s supernova levels of onscreen charm.
And then … the ball drops. The lights go out, and every paranoiac’s fear about the Y2K bug comes true, and then some. Planes fall out of the sky, telecommunications become unraveled, and—worst of all—everyone’s consumer electronics come alive, meld with each other “Virus”-style, and start summarily offing any unsuspecting human within range of a spinning blender blade or strangling computer cable. (The initial mayhem, with all the bawdy body horror that entails, is easily the film’s most entertaining stretch.) Forced to flee the house, Eli, Laura, and a ragtag crew of lost and lonely teens will have to brave the suburban woods and find their way back to town and find some way to stay alive.
In theory, it’s a really fun head-turn to the typical teen comedy, as if “Dazed and Confused” took a heel turn and Ben Affleck became the Terminator. But it’s a disappointment to see “Y2K” run out of steam so quickly after its initial rug-pull. In his zeal to both ape and subvert the kinds of films he’s riffing on (“The Terminator,” “The Goonies,”), Mooney lands in this frustrating middle ground between pastiche and parody, cutting himself off at the knees frequently for the sake of narrative subversion. The transition from the movie “Y2K” starts as to the movie it becomes is as halting and frustrating as you could imagine; interesting characters get offed way too early just to surprise and shock you and the teens left behind, only to leave you with no suitable replacements. The second half consists mostly of our remaining heroes wandering through the woods, bickering and dropping rap-rock references with arbitrary aplomb. (A few welcome detours happen, of course, chiefly revolving around Mooney as a crunchy stoner as obsessed with devil sticks as he is the end of the world; it’s the kind of dopey recurring character he’d play on “SNL,” and he’s used just enough to not overstay his welcome.)
It’s this second half that dooms the film as Mooney and Winter run out of ideas far too early with the house-party slaughter and meander for another hour, trying to figure out where else to take their premise. The kids we’re left to follow aren’t as interesting as those we left behind, the ’90s references exist merely for their own sake, and the pacing is just all over the place. And that’s before we’re treated to the film’s major cameo, one ostensibly meant to be a surprise but which is so telegraphed it’s in the film’s marketing materials: Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, who pops up in the final act to mentor our kids and get drawn into the fight for humanity. Durst, who, between this and “I Saw the TV Glow,” seems to delight in revisiting the decade that brought him fame on-screen, is at least a welcome burst of energy, especially when he dons his iconic red hat, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the “Harold & Kumar” films did this kind of thing better with NPH.
More than anything, “Y2K” feels like a step backwards for Mooney, who mined his clear love for the ’90s in previous post-“SNL” projects to at least say something about the time that produced him, and the effect it had on all of us latchkey kids. “Brigsby Bear” was a lovely nod to the way we glommed onto (and were harmed by) the children’s entertainment that socialized us; Netflix’s “Saturday Morning All-Star Hits!” played with the dark undertones of kid’s-cartoon programming blocks and beat “Quiet on Set” in its prodding of the Nickelodeon industrial complex. “Y2K,” though? It just wants you to point at the screen whenever you hear a dial-up tone or see someone wearing low-rise jeans. There’s no bite there beyond the vague gesture of humanity being ever more consumed by technology as it enters the 21st century. But slapping that in the middle of a tepid teen-party comedy robs it of that sting. “Y2K” doesn’t want to break stuff; it wants to dig it out of the trash and pine nostalgically for it. That’s just not as interesting.
