Remember the 90s? Remember the Y2K scare? Remember all the shit that came with both? Well, don’t worry if you can’t, because Saturday Night Live’s Kyle Mooney has you covered with Y2K, a comedy horror sci-fi that takes all the uncertainty we had about the approaching millennium and dumps it into a goofy, coming of age flick that doubles up as an end of the world comedy.
It’s kind of weird that the usually super serious production house of A24 has turned its indie eye to more populist forms of entertainment (or should I say their version of populist at least) with their first proper big budget blockbuster thanks to Alex Garland’s utterly terrifying Civil War. However, when turning their hand to horror/sci-fi chuckle fest Y2K, it seems that the studio has met its match as the movie instantly commits the cardinal sin of all movie comedies. It just isn’t that funny.
As the 90s draw to a close and paranoia is rife that the dreaded Millennium Bug will cause some hinky shit to go down, best friends Eli and Danny figure out how best to celebrate despite being social outcasts at their school. Eli has been crushing hard on his classmate Laura who, despite being a whizz with computers, is one of the popular kids at school, but even the news that she has recently split from her adonis boyfriend can’t help him counteract that even all the other misfit cliques look down on him. However, after delving into his father’s liquor cabinet, Eli decides that he and Danny aren’t going to blow the new year’s celebrations by vegetating in front of a VHS copy of Junior and the two head over to the house of a popular kid to party the night away, attempt to shoot their shots and try to avoid anyone who hates them.
However, when the clock strikes midnight, it turns out that the Y2K bug is actually real and zaps every bit of machinery with a blast of malevolent sentience that has only one command for their computerised brains: kill all humans. Obviously, the first hour is a bloodbath, with random machines building themselves murderous, Battle-Bot bodies that stab, slice and burn anyone who stands in their way, but a small group made up of comflicting social groups manages to escape the chaos and try to find shelter.
As they cower at a local sanctuary with a clutch of stoners (white dudes with dreadlocks ahoy), Eli realises that while they hide, the machines has a second stage in their plan in which they’ll go on and enslave any flesh bag they haven’t already killed in a move that’s fairly textbook for all cinematic robot invasions.
Can this bickering group of youths put their differences in musical taste aside for five minutes to save the world? With Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst on their side, surely all things are possible when it comes to breaking stuff.
There are many movies that Y2K chooses to cannibalise from that range from Superbad, This Is The End, Scouts Guide For The Zombie Apocalypse, Stephen King’s crazed coke-fest Maximum Overdrive and even forgotten 90s sci-fi pot boiler, Virus – however, in a frustrating twist, Mooney’s debut feature somehow manages to be less funny than any of them – and Virus wasn’t even a fucking comedy! The problem here seems to be our old friend, nostalgia, who is admittedly well served by Mooney lavish attention to detail that eagerly reminds everyone who was there of all the “hilarious” things we once had to put up with such as slow loading pornography, self important music snobs who spit pretentious bars at the drop of a red cap, VHS rental stores with a dimly lit adult section located in the back and multiple renditions of the Thong Song. However, the movie bizarrely seems to think that this is all it has to do to score some laughs and actual jokes prove to be worryingly thin on the ground; this means that during large portions of this comedy you may have a nostalgic smirk on your face for some of the tunes on display here (the soundtrack is, admittedly, a banger), but you’ll mostly be doing it in total silence precious little of the humour actually lands. God knows what anyone born north of 1990 is going to make of this.
Essentially tasked to play way less funny and endearing versions of Jonah Hill and Michael Cera’s characters from Superbad, Julian Dennison and Jaeden Martell forage for chemistry as they go through the teen flick motions. Martell’s Eli is your stereotypical skinny geek who is perpetually banished to the friend zone despite going on and on about his crush to anyone who’ll listen while Dennison’s Danny is the burly trash talker who somehow is still able to be the life and soul of the party despite also being a social outcast (how does that work, exactly?). Saddled with roles that are as threadbare as Clint Eastwood’s poncho, they still have more to work with than Rachel Zegler, who is dumped with an utterly colourless “pretty hacker chick” character that genuinely only seems to be there to tick the required “love intrest” and “exposition” boxes and not much else.
When you look back at other goofy teen comedy/horrors, such as Idle Hands, there’s usually a raucous sense of anarchy that feels like anything goes, and yet once again, Y2K can’t even manage this as its rather lame jokes are backed up by some lamer gore that, at times, doesn’t even seem to be trying. One character, who actually deserves something of a hyper gruesome demise literally dies by falling of a skateboard which I assume is meant to be an amusing shock twist. However, it just feels anti-climactic and poorly staged and while there’s a drilled skull here and an immolation there, anyone expecting the ludicrous carnage of, say, Maximum Overdrive, will be severely disappointed.
Not everything fails to get a laugh. Mooney’s extended cameo as a dreadlocked hippy garners quite a few chuckles and the appearance of Fred Durst as an unlikely saviour invokes amusing memories of Tom Jones’ turn in Mars Attacks!. Also scoring high are the killer machines themselves who are impressively rendered mostly with practical effects as their computer monitor heads sit atop fused together junkyard bodies.
However, even the sight of Fred Durst gravely giving a speech worthy of Robert Shaw in Jaws isn’t enough to break through the fact that Y2K just isn’t a very well put together film. Frequent shifts in tone to try and have us mawkishly empathise with its characters only slows the film down and makes it even unfunnier and the decision to kill a lot of its potentially amusing characters surprisingly early just annoyed me even more.
You can have a sci-fi that isn’t smart, you can even have horror that isn’t scary, but the second you try to feed us a comedy that invokes less laughs than poorly made, serious science fiction flick means that Y2K is sadly malware for the funny bone.
Minimum Underdrive.
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