Y2K Wasn’t a Disaster, But This Comedy About It Is

Y2K, the much-hyped fear that global machines would go kaput at the turn of the millennium, was a potential cataclysm that proved to be a joke. Y2K, on the other hand, is an attempt at comedy that’s a genuine disaster.

Saturday Night Live alum Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut, which hits theaters Dec. 6, strives to derive some laughs from melding two distinct genres—the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll teen coming-of-age movie and the apocalyptic science-fiction epic—and comes up with simply wan gags and watered-down nostalgia. Even those who lived through this brief bout of techno-anxiety will find it as tedious and strident as the screeching sounds of a dial-up modem connecting to the nascent internet.

Every generation invariably revisits its pre-adult past to chuckle at its now-dated hokiness, as well as to repurpose its famous pop-culture favorites as kitschy icons. In the case of Y2K (which is somehow being released by A24), the figure who gets the affectionate make-over treatment is Fred Durst, red-capped frontman for nü-metal titans Limp Bizkit, whose appearance is teased by early word that, as the calendar prepares to flip from 1999 to 2000, the rap-rock band will be playing a local show.

Durst has long since evolved from aggro-rebel trendsetter to passé dudebro to cute-and-corny antique, and he embraces both the love and the hate in Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter’s film, which gives him the opportunity to rally humanity in its fight against extinction by performing an acoustic-guitar rendition of Limp Bizkit’s cover of “Faith.” It’s a full-circle moment for Durst, reinstating him as a cherished exemplar of his age, and to his credit, Durst has enough fun with his brief turn that he almost convinces one that songs like “Rollin’” and “Break Stuff”—both of which are prominently featured on the soundtrack—are cheesy-fun anthems rather than intolerable dreck.

Alas, Durst only cameos late in Y2K, whose story is about Eli (Jaeden Martell), a nerdy high-school junior who fancies popular girl Laura (Rachel Zegler), with whom he talks to online via an AOL connection and Instant Messenger. Mooney wastes no time recreating the computer screen of a typical 1999 teen, complete with web browser windows, CD-burning apps, and Real Player videos that frequently break into a pixelated mess. In an introductory bandwidth-challenged clip, Bill Clinton mentions the looming Y2K crisis.

Yet other than a cursory subsequent mention of the issue by Eli’s dad Howard (Tim Heidecker), it’s never brought up again. Barely establishing the supposed calamity poised to wreak havoc at the stroke of midnight, the film assumes viewers are familiar with this ephemeral doom-and-gloom moment in time. While that might be true with regards to its thirtysomething target audience, it nonetheless renders its tale context-free and, thus, sketchy and adrift.

Though Eli pines for Laura, especially once she ends one of her IMs with “xoxo,” he spends all his time with loud and brash best friend Danny (Julian Dennison), who exercises along with his mom to Tae Bo and carries around a single Durex prophylactic that functions according to the Chekhov’s Condom storytelling principle.

Eli and Danny are picked on bullies led by Farkas (Stranger Things’ Eduardo Franco) and Ash (Lachlan Watson), the former a pitiful freestyle rhymer and the latter a punk in a Slipknot tank-top, and they’re mostly ignored by Laura’s clique. Their sole other pal is Garrett (Mooney), a dreadlocked adult video store clerk who gets Danny high in his rental establishment’s “champagne room” (i.e., the nook that contains X-rated offerings) and prattles on about the American Revolution and why the word “laser” is spelled with an “s.”

Mooney radiates a dim-bulb stoner enthusiasm that’s occasionally amusing, but like Durst, he’s consigned to the periphery in order to maintain focus on wet-blanket Eli, who begrudgingly gives in to Danny’s plea that they attend a New Year’s Eve party being thrown by Soccer Chris (The Kid Laroi).

There, Danny’s outgoing personality makes him a sensation, whereas Eli continues to be the butt of everyone’s joke—including Danny’s, who inadvertently saddles his buddy with an unflattering nickname. Everything goes topsy-turvy, however, when 2000 arrives and electronic appliances and devices become sentient and lethally hostile.

Much carnage ensues as the machines rise up and combine with each other to create killer robots with laptops and Tamagotchis for brains, and blades and saws for hands. With most of their mates dead, Eli and the remaining survivors take to the woods to find shelter and formulate a plan of action—thereby giving Eli another shot with generic love interest Laura, who despite having a hunky older ex-boyfriend (Mason Gooding) slowly warms up to him.

Y2K’s narrative, as it were, hinges on Laura’s computer skills, which Eli believes are the key to thwarting this menace. Mooney dramatizes Laura’s hacking in the same absurd virtual-reality manner—in which computers’ interior landscapes look like cities full of digital skyscrapers—pioneered by the likes of Hackers. Meanwhile, his dastardly cyber-villain is conceived in The Lawnmower Man-via-Max Headroom fashion.

At almost every juncture, though, the film fails to devise a witty or bonkers twist that might energize its rampant retro-fetishism. Instead, it falls back on jokes about teens having porn on their computers, and spot-on recreations of archaic tutorial and educational videos, to embellish its paper-thin plot. There’s also a dull recurring bit about the pretentious hip-hop stylings of CJ (Daniel Zolghadri), another of this endeavor’s unfunny players who eventually bonds with Ash over memories of their first time getting high.

Using Y2K as the hook for a goof-off about the end of the world isn’t, in theory, a terrible idea, but Mooney and Winter are so nonchalant about establishing their time period, setting, or characters that the entire venture feels tossed-off. Y2K doesn’t skimp on the 1999 musical call-backs, from Sisqó’s “Thong Song” to Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” to Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” and it does capture a flicker of the era’s particular strain of dim-bulb machismo—here epitomized by Durst, who unites his troops by having them, well, break stuff. Unfortunately, those touchstones (as well as Alicia Silverstone’s participation as Eli’s mom) are merely token embellishments for a film that doesn’t go wild enough in any direction.

The proceedings’ wholesale chintziness occasionally suggests that the writing/directing duo are trying to parody their chosen genres. Yet in the end, that effort is futile as the material’s humor is limp.