Satirical Horror-Comedy Y2K Dials Up Frustration
If you took Maximum Overdrive, Hackers, Virus, and Superbad and tossed them all into a blender, you might end with something like the horror comedy Y2K. The picture posits that the Y2K virus was far more catastrophic than conspiracy theorists (and a great deal of the political establishment) feared it was going to be back in December of 1999. While in reality all of those worries were ado about nothing, director Kyle Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter have conjured up a what-if scenario that’s far more apocalyptic, and only a pair of horny high school juniors can stop an evil A.I. from taking over the world.
It’s a solid idea, and goodness knows the talented cast — which includes youngsters Rachel Zegler (West Side Story), Jaeden Martell (It), Julian Dennison (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Deadpool 2), Lachlan Watson (Chucky’s Glen|Glenda), and Mason Gooding (Scream and Scream VI) working alongside comedic stalwarts like Alicia Silverstone (Clueless) and Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric fame — is up to the task of making it all work. However, the film still comes up frustratingly short. For every clever idea Mooney and Winter have, they deliver several more that fail to hit the mark. It’s a mess.
Small-town New Jersey best friends Eli (Martell) and Danny (Dennison) decide New Year’s Eve 1999 is the night everything changes for them. It’s the dawn of a new century. Tonight they are going to lose their virginity or, at the very least, kiss the girl of their dreams when the clock strikes midnight, the ballyhooed (and likely overhyped) Y2K be damned.
But at the stroke of midnight events take a catastrophic turn. Everything with a microchip rises up in revolt. A malevolent A.I. algorithm decides humanity needs to be subjugated. It’s taking over, creating gigantic robotic minions with a collective consciousness who will either kill everyone standing in their way or transform them into emotionless drones who will be slaves to their cybernetic whims.
The whole thing is as goofy as it sounds, but that’s not the problem. While the byplay between Martell and Dennison is outstanding, and even though the A.I.’s initial attack on the stupefied teenagers during their New Year’s Eve party is inspired, things quickly become less interesting from there. Every scene feels disconnected from the ones surrounding it. Character transformations happen because the plot needs them to so it can get all the survivors into the same room during the climax and not because they’re based on anything emotionally sincere. The gags stop generating laughs, and even some of the cleverest ideas (the digital animations are straight out of The Lawnmower Man and Hackers, purposefully evoking memories of Max Headroom) go nowhere of merit.
What’s strange, and as far as I’m concerned even more annoying, is how toothless it all is. Say what you will about Stephen King’s demented attempt to direct, 1986’s cosmically deranged flop Maximum Overdrive, but as cinematically inept as it may be there’s a good reason it’s managed to cultivate such a devoted cult following over the decades. Its go-for-broke attitude left an impression, as did King’s insistence that everyone and everything is fair game for dismemberment, evisceration, or being flattened by a carnivorous steamroller.
Unfortunately, Mooney and Winter are unable to do the same. After the initial attack on the partygoers goes suitably bonkers, there’s a rudimentary predictability to every single thing that happens afterward from that point forward. There is no mystery as to who will live and who will die, the humor lacks any bite, and the social observations are ineffectually blasé. Nothing is particularly threatening, and it does not help that the filmmakers keep calling attention to their feature’s cartoonish absurdity. It’s almost as if they’re making an Airplane or Hot Shots!-style parody and this substantially undercuts any chance these proceedings may have had to resonate.
It’s possible this lunacy will play better to a younger audience who didn’t actually live through the Y2K hysteria and were not teenagers (or in college) during the 1990s and saw the whirlwind social change that was taking place for themselves. The peculiar lack of insight or understanding of the decade is unforgivably galling. It’s a surface-level facsimile of the world during that time, nothing more.
But maybe that’s the idea. Especially as dumbfounding political forces attempt to take things backward several decades, it could be that the film is using its horror-infused historical revisionism to comment on the rightwing extremism that treats science like it’s a bad word, Stepfordizes women as if it were the 1950s, stamps out individualism, and tries to eradicate LGBTQ+ gains entirely.
As nice as that sounds, I think that’s giving Y2K far too much credit. This scattershot, blood-drenched comedy of cybernetic terrors frequently loses connection. Like the promising early days of the internet, its only lasting legacy will likely be one smothered in disappointment and missed opportunity.
Film Rating: 1½ (out of 4)
