“Y2K” Succumbs to Virus

Y2K (Kyle Mooney, 2024) 1 out of 5 stars

Those of us who were alive and conscious at the end of the last millennium well remember the rising panic, as the year 2000 approached, over the potential for mass computer mayhem. How so? A good number of people worried over an ostensible computer bug, dubbed Y2K, caused by the numeral change, within applications, from 99 to 00. The new eponymous film from actor-turned-director Kyle Mooney (making his debut behind the camera), set on New Year’s Eve, 1999, imagines one version of what might have happened had some of the fears come to pass. Unfortunately, imagination fails everyone involved in this misbegotten project.

The flaws and failings of Y2K are legion, beginning with the wildly inconsistent tone. Is it a gross-out horror comedy? A sentimental celebration of outcasts finding redemption? A riff on quirky coming-of-age teen films like the far superior Superbad? It has elements of all of this, cobbled together in slapdash fashion, without ever settling on a main approach. And while there’s nothing wrong with complexity of script and mise-en-scène, the movie is all over the place in terms of approach. Just when we think we should laugh, it asks us to cry, and vice versa, without providing enough incentive for either reaction.

Mooney and his co-writer Evan Winter also miss the opportunity to lean completely into late 1990s nostalgia, unlike the very silly (and unpardonably sexist, but nevertheless fun) 1980s-steeped Hot Tub Time Machine, which reveled, with great abandon, in the trappings of its time period. Sure, they feature music and gadgets of the era, but it’s a surface treatment only, which even the inclusion of Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst only seems to emphasize to a greater degree. Of all the ostensible icons of the time, he is who they chose? Making him sing George Michael’s “Faith” does not help.

The tale, such as it is, follows what happens when best friends Eli (Jaeden Martell, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone) and Danny (Julian Dennison, Godzilla vs. Kong)—two unpopular high-school nerds—go to a New Year’s party for the cool kids. Eli has a major crush on classmate Laura (Rachel Zegler, West Side Story), which is the main reason they crash the soirée, but Danny is determined to finally get laid, no matter with whom. So he turns up the charm, and actually appears to be getting somewhere when all hell breaks loose.

That hell comes in the form of an attack of the machines, which have gained sentience and are determined to wreak havoc and enslave the human race. Sounds like a great idea for an action-comedy with overtones of sci-fi and horror, and at first it seems like it will be exactly that. But then, as each scene unfolds, we realize that Mooney has no idea what he is doing with the actors, all of whom flail around without much purpose, awkward pauses left in through inept editing. If there was a virus, it infected the entire production, and this mess is the result.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.