Y2K Review: A Whole Lot Of Exciting Build-Up With A So-So Follow Through. Sounds Familiar.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, and all of our worst millennial nightmares are about to come true in Kyle Mooney’s high energy sci-fi comedy Y2K.

Eli (Jaeden Martell, Knives Out) and Danny (Julian Dennison, Hunt for the Wilderpeople) are a pair of 15-year-old high school cyphers looking to up their social capital at the turn of the 20^th century. The most popular boy in school is throwing a New Year’s Eve party, and the plan is that they crash it and crush it. Laura (Rachel Zegler, West Side Story), the girl of Eli’s dreams, will be there and he’s determined to make the most of it. Armed with a belly full of their parents’ vodka and a badass CD-R mixtape, they jump into the fray. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose, right?

Well, as the clock strikes midnight, things start to go horribly wrong when the vaguely threatening concept of the Y2K shutdown we all heard about back in the day comes to gruesome fruition. Not only do the electronics go haywire, now they are out for blood, and they aren’t taking any prisoners. The party becomes a bloodbath as the machines hack and slash their way through the partygoers, and the rest of the town, while Eli and his ragtag crew of survivors try to outrun the future, but not all of them will make it till morning.

Director Kyle Mooney and his writing partner Evan Mooney go full-on nostalgia porn in Y2K, stacking references to the point of absurdity, while also delivering a pretty heartfelt story woven through the visual mayhem. A lot of the jokes fall into the “remember this thing from 1999?” category, an easy mark for an elder millennial audience, but perhaps less so for anyone outside that very specific age range. Thankfully, the cheap gags fade as the film wears on and the story proper takes over.

For all of its broad humor and cartoonish violence, Y2K is ultimately a story about relationships. The opening twenty minutes or so – while exhausting the visual markers of the time – does a great job at setting up the sweet and very genuine friendship between the shy Eli and his boisterous best friend Danny. The former is a wallflower trying to get a girl to notice him, while the latter is an unlikely charisma bomb, dropping megaton energy wherever he goes.

Sadly, a major catastrophe splits them up before the first act ends and the rest of the night is spent with a deeply damaged Eli, his dream girl Laura, nu metal freak, Ash (Lachlan Watson, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), and Fred Durst (?) trying to save the world from their ambitious robot wannabe-overlords.

There’s a lot to like about Y2K. The opening, in spite of its pandering, shows a lot of genuine heart and delivers some big laughs as we get to know our characters. Their relationships with each other become our relationships with them. The audience is a part of this very relatable story. Martell and Zegler’s chemistry is a bit awkward, but it is awkward in the way that chemistry between 15-year-old kids is supposed to be. The big problem is that the calamity that should begin the most rousing portion of the narrative instead grinds the characters’ stories to a halt as they must now focus their energies on survival.

For all of the endearing set up in the first half of the movie, the back half turns into a bit of a yawner, depending on well-worn tropes without bringing a whole lot of new energy to the game. There’s plenty of very timely commentary on humanity’s dependence on technology – it’s perhaps even a bit too blunt – but the actual beats of the film all feel too familiar.

For all of its promise, Y2K brings a little too much in the way of nostalgia. Like its namesake panic, there’s a whole lot of exciting build up, but when the payoff arrives, it’s more than a little limp (bizket). I’m not saying this movie is bad enough that it makes me wanna break stuff, but I am a little blue (da ba dee) that Y2K doesn’t sing the songs that remind me of the good times the way I’d hoped.