Nostalgic ‘disaster comedy’ Y2K only reminds us how much better comedies used to be

What to say about a movie like Y2K? It’s vapid, artless and unfunny. It’s not so terrible that it’s worth remarking on its monumental flaws but it also has few redeeming qualities to latch onto. It’s a void of an experience that leaves little to no impression on the viewer. It has few laughs and almost nothing to say about its character or the world we live in.

Even as an empty nostalgia grab, it captures little of the era it depicts. It makes Ti West’s period film homages look like high-art masterpieces of tone and aesthetic. If we’re living through an era where young people yearn for the plastic consumerism of the late 1990s, this movie — the directorial debut by former SNL cast member Kyle Mooney — offers them a mood board of objects and references to buy and wear with very little consideration for actual context or content. 

Set on the eve of the year 2000, the film follows two teenage boys on their way to a New Year’s Eve Party. Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison) are nerds who spend their days playing video games and transforming action figures into characters from That 70s Show. A big high school party becomes a banner opportunity for them to raise their social status and maybe even kiss a girl.

Y2K starts off as a kind of gross-out coming-of-age “comedy” that turns into a gross-out horror “comedy.” While it hits the familiar beats of movies like Superbad or American Pie, like many modern comedies, it replaces actual jokes or bits with jokey cadence. At a certain point, the movie takes a drastic tonal shift that embraces over-the-top cartoon violence. For audiences who love gore and insane deaths, this might be somewhat entertaining, but those sequences are short-lived and only slightly more inspired than the rest of the movie. 

What’s especially disappointing about the film is that while it embraces the knick-knacks and style of the late 1990s, it does little in attempting to capture the visual language of the period. Though, in retrospect, it feels insane to argue for the aesthetic integrity of a movie like Superbad, the average quality of most American films has dropped so significantly over the past two decades that Superbad and its ilk have a certain glow (in this case, one that’s fairly yellow) that might be garish but at least has some aura of personality. (Superbad co-star Jonah Hill, incidentally, is a producer on this film.) Now everything looks like a poorly lit TV movies churned out as part of an endless content grab for streamers. It’s not just the quality of the image, though, but also the entire film’s sense of rhythm, which lacks any personality or intuition. It’s a product that almost feels post-human, churned out by the same villainous machines wreaking havoc in the movie when the clock hits midnight on Jan. 1, 2000.

It’s not even that Y2K is overtly bad — the actors are fine, the effects are fine and some of the ideas are, well… fine. It might be asking too much to expect a film like this to offer something in terms of nuance or perspective, but it can’t even deliver on laughs. What happened to jokes? Even with a relatively short runtime, the movie’s lack of effective comedy makes the movie drag endlessly. A little laughter would have gone a long way in endearing this otherwise middling film project for A24. As it stands, it’s barely worth recommending as passive background TV while you’re folding laundry at home. ■

Y2K opens in Montreal theatres on Friday, Dec. 6.

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