'Y2K' Made Me Want to 'Break Stuff,' But Not in a Good Way

Kyle Mooney directed a teen comedy set on New Year's Eve 1999. Yes, there's a Fred Durst cameo.

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A24

The most shocking part of Y2K was Kyle Mooney’s name showing up at the end. I hadn’t known that much about it going in. I knew Mooney was in it, along with Jaeden Martell (fantastic opposite Billy Murray in St. Vincent) and Julian Dennison (brilliant alongside Sam Neill in Hunt for the Wilderpeople), and was vaguely aware that it was some sort of goof on nostalgia cycle-ready coming-of-age tales. What if teen comedy during Y2K, only Y2K was real? That was all I needed, and I imagine that’s about how most people who love movies approach going to a movie.

It’s a good pitch, and maybe that’s the problem: sometimes a pitch is so obviously a greenlight that it makes the actual writing part feel like a chore. The sense of discovery is all used up, and the rest is all just going through the motions.

I don’t know, I’m speaking in hypotheticals here because I’m trying to figure out how one of my favorite comedy people of all time turned in a directorial debut that made me groan throughout and that I almost walked out of multiple times. Y2K, which Mooney directed and co-wrote (with Evan Winter), quietly hit theaters over the weekend in a relatively underpromoted release not typical of its distributor (A24) or befitting its commercial genre. Maybe they knew it wasn’t coming together all along? Whatever the case, the movie feels like a collection of references with no real characters or even much of a narrative core.

There’s sore of a loose idea that it’s Superbad or Booksmart (shy nerd plus gregarious chubby friend trying to to get laid) with period piece coming-of-age trappings (Ladybird, Turning Red, Didi) meets a high concept A24 horror movie (what if Y2K was real?). Maybe that’s too many things to be already, and there’s no space left for characters. Either way, none ever really take shape. The characters seem to shift from scene to scene, based not on any internal character logic but on the basis of whatever cultural touchstone they happen to be borrowing from in that scene. Y2K’s characters don’t develop so much as self-obliterate. The story doesn’t do them any favors either, with too many wild swings and too little to hold onto. It’s a movie where truly anything can happen, but mostly not in a good way.

For 20 minutes it’s a normal high school film. We open on 12/31/99, when the whole world is abuzz with anticipation about what will happen when the year hits 00 and all the computers think it’s 1900 (remember that???). Meanwhile, our heroes are two sorta outcasts scheming a way to find someone to make out with when the countdown ends and the noisemakers go off. When the ball drops, their balls drop, and whatnot (my joke, not theirs). Eli (Martell) has a crush, Laura, (Rachel Zeigler) who is both a genius computer programmer and hot/popular, if you can believe; and a best friend, Danny (Julian Dennison) who is fat/loud. Dennison is a Māori from New Zealand and props to Y2K for just letting him do his natural accent (one of the funniest things about him) and throwing in half a line of dialog to explain it rather than forcing him to do a bad American accent for a whole movie (I always wonder why more movies don’t do this).

The big party is going down at Soccer Chris’ house (an asshole with bleached tips and a puka shell necklace who sadly looks a lot like yours truly c. 2000) and Eli and Danny are determined to make it their scene of sexual triumph. But not before a quick trip to the local video store to smoke some weed and watch some porn with their older buddy, Garrett, played by Mooney himself, in dreadlocks, big sideburns, and one of those poncho sweaters every stoner wore in 2000 (I’m looking at you, Clint).

There’s a magic that happens every time Mooney is onscreen that only makes its lack more apparent when he’s not. Mooney is in the pantheon of greats, maybe the all-time greatest, when it comes to a certain style of storytelling that I like to call “the Dumbass Whisperer” (Richard Linklater and Elmore Leonard — especially the way he writes cops — also come to mind). Mooney nails every stutter, tic, and micro mannerism of different types of dopey guys, often the sensitive yet inarticulate ones, so well that it’s like he’s doing a virtuosic uncanny impression of a guy you’ve never met but also have. Whenever I need to explain to someone why San Diego is a funny place, I show them Inside SoCal, or one of Mooney’s pre-SNL sketches.

Mooney is so absurdly fucking brilliant at this kind of acting and sketch writing that you wonder if maybe he’s just so used to scripts being a vessel for that kind of genius that all he has to do at the keyboard is just describe a backdrop. The other actors in his movie don’t have that capability (few do, and these actors have all been wonderful in other stuff) and so most of Y2K’s scenes are like waiting for lightning bolts that never come. At best.

After the 15 or 20 minutes setting up the classic big high school party at Soccer Chris’s house, the clock strikes midnight and suddenly all the electronics go apeshit. Or something. Kids keep dying gorily via sentient drills and anthropomophized hedge trimmers. What is going on? Y2K never comes close to a coherent justification and generally seems caught between and over-the-top parody of worst-case doomer scenarios of what might’ve happened that night and some sort of earnest or coherent version of that. There’s no rules, man! Not that this story has to be believable, it just needs any sort of internal logic or even a recognizable sense of cause and effect.

It’s high concept. Fine. But the characters also seem to keep acting out different flavors of John Hughes drama that just show up out of the blue with no set up. Eli resents Danny for being more chill and cool than he is. A coed white hip hop clique who end up on the run with Eli, Danny, and Laura resent Laura for being popular. Laura feels like a victim of her own hotness (a la Jennifer Love Hewitt in Can’t Hardly Wait or Molly Ringwald in Breakfast Club). Blah blah blah, nothing character-based really works, because Y2K is more just a grab bag of references.

The flood of 1999 cultural references is so constant and so over the top that it seems almost intended to be a satire of period piece coming-of-age movies (which is very much the tone of Kyle Mooney’s promo video that went a long way towards convincing me to see this).

Only Y2K never goes quite far enough to be recognizable as parody. It lands in an awkward middle ground where it’s neither satirical nor worth being invested in. Is this making fun of elder millennial nostalgia bait or is it an earnest attempt at elder millennial nostalgia bait?

In one scene, Eli, Laura, and the hip hop kids not really worth identifying individually here pile into a porta potty to escape a killer robot thingamajig. The porta potty slides down a hill with all of them inside. They emerge covered in shit and chemicals, at which point… Eli has a tantrum and throws his skater shoes into a creek. I guess he’s mad about the identity he’s chosen? Like, “why do I wear skater shoes when I don’t even skateboard?” Why that would come up right after falling down a hill inside a porta potty and getting covered in shit next to his crush I have no idea. That was one point when I almost gave up and walked out, but ended up staying out of some misguided duty to completism.

It feels like maybe they just pitched a combination of too many genre references and by the time they realized they were incompatible it was too late to back out. I can only speculate, but Y2K doesn’t work, and the only time it comes close to working is when Mooney himself is on screen.

It’s disappointing, because Kyle Mooney already wrote a movie that succeeds on basically every level that this one fails — Brigsby Bear, another kooky, sci-fi tinged genre mashup mostly starring teen actors, released in 2017 and still criminally underseen. Only that film, directed by Dave McCary, from a script by Mooney and Kyle Costello, succeeds in creating characters that outgrow the elevator pitch early on. Starring Mooney himself as a kid who escapes the isolationist cult run by his father and whose only entertainment was the weird show, “Brigsby Bear,” created just for him by his dad — eventually turns a high concept into something real, a heartfelt ode to making stuff with your friends. It’s a zany idea that becomes a wonderful story.

Brigsby Bear had Mark Hamill as Mooney’s biological father, doing his best acting since Star Wars. In its place, Y2K has an extended cameo from Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, then at the peak of his popularity (“Dude. He looks so old,” one character quips).

Durst just showing up at all should be hilarious, and sporadically it is. But Y2K’s story is such a mess that I came away genuinely feeling bad for him, having to do a state fair version of his act that should’ve been much funnier. Can you imagine what it would take for me, a punk rock kid who grew up hating Fred Durst and his white-rapper-who-always-sounds-like-he’s-about-to-cry shtick, to feel bad for this man? (Not trying to claim the artistic high ground here btw, I owned multiple albums of swing revival music).

I can barely type these words without vomiting, but it’s true: Fred Durst deserved better.