Y2K, the directorial debut of Saturday Night Live cast member Kyle Mooney, is part romcom, part tech-horror, and too unfocused to commit to either one. The turn-of-the-millennium throwback leans too heavily on nostalgia; it’s concerned far more with familiar products and pop-culture details than with how its characters might behave, especially in the face of practical, Frankensteinian tech monsters. Instead, the ensemble are left trying to navigate the movie’s scattershot tone — one that oscillates between comedy and melodrama without fully letting laughs or heartbreak land.
The movie’s flimsy set-ups are accompanied by disconnected pay-offs that emanate from nowhere. For instance, its third act pivots around a key cameo that would have worked like gangbusters had it even been mildly gestured towards. Instead, Y2K moves from scenario to scenario as though its post-apocalyptic saga were being improvised in the moment, further contributing to its haphazard tonal swings. While the film features a few hints of inventive violence, these scenes become difficult to parse emotionally. Some are played for laughs, others for intense drama, but there’s not really a meaningful distinction between the two.
Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison and Rachel Zegler all perform admirably as their prescribed, ’90s-high-school-movie types — the awkward geek, the boastful ball of energy, and the misunderstood popular girl, respectively — but they’re rarely allowed to push up against (let alone exist outside) those narrow parameters. There are colourful side characters too, including Lachlan Watson’s angsty emo rocker Ash and Daniel Zolghadri’s wannabe rapper CJ, but this supporting ensemble is rarely used to comment on the central characters, or the era at large. It’s a film where even the most prominent characters feel like window-dressing to their own stories. On the plus side, at least their hair and costumes are period-appropriate.
