Y2Krap

Kyle Mooney's directorial debut ain't no 'Maximum Overdrive.'

In 1986, Stephen King made a movie called Maximum Overdrive. Obviously, tons of movies have been made based on King’s work, but Maximum Overdrive is the only movie he ever wrote and directed himself. It’s about a comet that passes over Earth and somehow imbues all machines with sentience, which the machines, naturally, use to kill people. It’s one of those movies that’s so bad it’s good, and has become something of a cult classic on account of it’s awesome AC/DC soundtrack…

…and not-so-awesome scenes like this one:

Y2K, the directorial debut of former Saturday Night Live cast member Kyle Mooney, has an almost identical premise as Maximum Overdrive, except in this case, the machines go nuts thanks to the titular computer bug instead of a comet. But truly the biggest difference between the two movies is that Maximum Overdrive is supposed to be serious but winds up being funny, while Y2K is supposed to be funny but winds up being boring.

The plot of Y2K, to whatever degree it exists, is basic stuff: two dorky kids (Jaeden Martell from It and Julian Dennison from Hunt for the Wilderpeople) go to a New Year’s Eve house party. When shit hits the fan, they must evade being slaughtered by homicidal Tamagotchis and VHS players; also along for the ride is the popular girl on whom one of them is crushing (Rachel Zegler, seemingly forever doomed to be wasted in awful movies after her stunning debut in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story).

A threadbare plot isn’t a problem for a movie like this - but the absence of laughter and fun sure as hell is. You expect a movie set on New Year’s Eve 1999 to be dripping with nostalgia, but holy smokes, does Mooney overdo it. Within the first five minutes alone, he shoves in “hilarious” references to AIM, Bill Clinton, Tae Bo, iMacs, CD burning, Super Nintendo, video stores, and various hit songs from the era (to say nothing of the fact that Clueless star Alicia Silverstone shows up briefly as Martell’s mom, and Limp Bizkit asshat frontman Fred Durst winds up having a major supporting role as himself).

Problem is, there isn’t a single authentic joke about any of these things; they’re just trotted out on screen, like, “Hey, hey, remember this stuff?” And. Yeah. Like Mooney, I was a teenager in 1999. I do remember all that stuff. So? What of it?

If you’re gonna laugh at the very notion that people once had to use dial-up modems, why not make a movie set in 1989 and laugh at the very notion that people once didn’t have the Internet at all? Shit, why not make a movie set in the 1940s about how funny it is that there was once no such thing as the polio vaccine? There are these YouTube videos where they show little kids stuff like rotary phones, and the kids are all, “But how did you text with these?”, and I get why that’s funny. But the mere fact that rotary phones once existed is not uproarious in and of itself. No one would piss themselves laughing just by looking at a photo of a record player, with no additional observation made about the record player.

That’s really just the beginning of Y2K’s issues. There’s a weird tonal thing going on, where there are scenes that are played as deadly serious and emotional, but it’s not clear if they’re supposed to be deadly serious or not, because they contain exactly as many gags as the “funny” scenes (i.e., none). And the characters are too paper-thin for us to give a shit who lives or who dies regardless.

Well, that’s not entirely true: it is sad that every character who is even the tiniest bit interesting or charismatic gets killed off quickly, but only because it means we have to spend more time with the boring wet blankets that populate the rest of the movie.

As for the kills, they’re… fine? They’re gory enough I guess, but they’re not especially inventive. A great kill should elicit a collective “OHHHHHH!” from the audience; I saw a sold-out screening of Y2K (it was a small theater), and there were no audible reactions from the crowd whatsoever. Part of the problem may be that the kills are so predictable. For example, there’s this thing that sometimes happens in movies, where a character will gear up for a big fight or heroic task or whatever, and then the gag winds up being that they get killed immediately. Like this scene from The Cabin in the Woods, for example:

Yeah, well, Mooney uses this bit twice. TWICE! In a 91-minute-long movie! You might not see it coming the first time, but you will definitely see it coming the second time.

The only genuinely funny joke comes in the very last scene of the movie, and it’s a throwaway, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sight gag involving some Limp Bizkit lyrics being used as a political campaign slogan that evokes chuckles, not belly laughs. As demonstrated by his numerous SNL send-ups of sitcoms, reality shows, and skater culture, Mooney has long been obsessed with lampooning turn-of-the-century popular culture. But Y2K suggests it might be time for him to turn his attention to satirizing other areas of interest.