Flashes Of Brilliance Can’t Quite Pull ‘Y2K’ Together [Review]

In 2008, the New Zealand folk parody band Flight of the Conchords released their self-titled album, and with it the track “Robots,” originally debuting in live form on the pilot episode of their self-titled HBO sitcom. About a “distant future” where robots ruled the world, its lyrics detailing it’s “it is the distant future / the year 2000 / we are robots / the world is quite different ever since the robotic uprising of the late 90s.” Y2K, the directorial debut of SNL’s Kyle Mooney, is in essence the story of that uprising. It’s a riff on late-90’s nostalgia boasting a strong cast and a bevy of good ideas, unfortunately mixed in with a variety of less successful ones.

It’s 1999: Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison) play a pair of friends a little on the outside of their school’s ever-present cliques. Eli’s painfully shy, with a major crush on popular girl Laura (Rachel Zegler). She certainly knows he exists–she’s a clandestine programmer and they chat on the fledgling internet–but he’s far too shy to ask her out, much to Danny’s dismay. The pair get an opportunity to crash a high school New Year’s Eve party, where Danny hits his stride and gets an immediate boost in popularity, leaving Eli even more alienated.

It’s soon to be null and void, however, because it’s Y2K and the world’s computer networks are about to go haywire. Not, as widely worried, because of a massive bug related to the millennial transition, but rather because a mysterious force sends the world’s technology on a mission to kill or enslave humanity, combining themselves in ever larger forms in an absurdist tapestry of misanthropic death. It’s up to a gaggle of teenagers and Fred Durst to stop them.

When It Leans Into Full-Tilt Absurdism, ‘Y2K’ Is At Its Best

Y2K is essentially fueled by two things: an ironic nostalgia for elements of growing up in the late 1990’s, and Kyle Mooney’s absurdist sensibilities. Late-90’s cultural artifacts and references abound, from Surge and AOL to casual group singalongs of “Tubthumping,” to sequences that are meant to evoke (or are directly lifted from) Iain Softley’s Hackers. They’re used as a sort of nod-and-a-wink send-up of nostalgia, not as much a blind subservience to the past, as audiences chuckle at the memories from an ironic distance.

Perhaps the strongest element of Y2K is its absurdism, where an A.I.’s grand plan is to enslave humanity using composite, self-creating automatons of computer, wire, and consumer products. There’s no way for those creations to ever build themselves this way, attack humans the ways they do, and so on; it’s genuinely impossible, but humorous to watch odd monstrosities chase down terrified characters, improving themselves along the way with random household objects. The Machiavellian A.I. at the film’s center welcomes new machine recruits with a sort of corporate training video explaining its master plan, but with computer graphics that belong in the 1990’s series ReBoot. The film is at its best with these sorts of gags, lovingly skewering all sorts of the era’s oddest cultural artifacts and showing characters taking the impossible seriously.

The film boasts a remarkably strong cast, though admittedly they aren’t always used properly. Jaeden Martell is a great cast for Eli, landing the character’s soft-spoken likability and his evolution into badassery. Julian Dennison is hilarious as the charismatic (but a little odd) best friend, while Rachel Zegler conjures her inner Shannyn Sossamon for the smart, sweet, but nerdy ‘popular girl’ that inhabits exactly 53% of all late 90’s-era rom-coms.

‘Y2K’ Subverts Expectations, But Not Always Successfully

Regrettably, while the cast is excellent, they’re not all consistently utilized to the fullest. Julian Dennison, for example, is excellent before being sidelined dramatically in the narrative. There are characters who are similarly removed from the story because the script, co-written by Mooney and Evan Winters, boasts a preference for subverting expectations. On the one hand, it’s nice to have stories that surprise. On the other hand, the in-the-moment laughs are sometimes gained at the expense of sidelining or removing great characters who could have fueled hilarity for the whole film’s duration. The payoff simply isn’t worth the gambit.

Besides character fates, there are other plaguing missed opportunities. The film’s MVP in key scenes is none other than Fred Durst, playing himself. His energy is infectious, and the film’s jokes about the band and its legacy clearly come from the perspective of fans. It’s amusing, but again, some of the choices are clearly intended to evoke humor from surprise, but in ways that feel like first pass ideas. For example, ‘Break Stuff’ plays as the characters do, indeed, break stuff, but the action is interrupted. Of course it is, that’s violating expectations.

A key scene later involves a Limp Bizkit performance of ‘Faith,’ when in context that could be a memorable, excellent scene if ‘Break Stuff’ had been involved. Y2K routinely errs on the side of subverting expectations, which sometimes works quite well but falls flat or provokes Pyrrhic laughter just as often. On occasions where it doesn’t work, it’s rarely because the idea is inherently doomed to failure; often the misses feel like mere first pass ideas, frustratingly close to success.

As a whole, Y2K is a mixed bag. There’s a good cast, but they’re often underutilized. It surprises, but sometimes the surprises don’t work as well as they could. There are scenes with great set ups but inadequate payoffs, almost like the potential of the set up wasn’t really understood. Mooney has a good eye, and there are real moments of greatness, but it’s still a wildly uneven sci-fi horror comedy.  

Y2K is in theaters now.

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