It's New Year's Eve, so why not watch the new sci-fi/horror/comedy by former SNL alum Kyle Mooney, Y2K, which he directed and co-wrote (with Evan Winter)?
Jaeden Martell (IT) stars as Eli, an awkward high schooler whose only friend is Danny (Julian Dennison, not slimmed down in the least since Deadpool 2). He has a crush on Laura (Rachel Zegler, West Side Story), a beautiful classmate and secret tech nerd, but of course can't tell her how he feels about her and her cool kids clique are disgusted by the "Sticky Boys" (as they call themselves) because of course, this being a teen movie.
They decide to crash a New Year's Eve party being held at Laura's ex-boyfriend Soccer Chris's (Aussie rapper The Kid Laroi) house and it's your usual movie rager party until the clock strikes midnight, ushering in 2000 and the lights flicker out. After a few seconds, they come back on and it appears Y2K was a dud (as it was in reality), but then a toy jeep with other toys combined with it burns a kid's face to death with a makeshift flamethrower and other devices begin attacking and killing the partygoers including Danny.
Eli, Laura and a pair of local rap crew members who bullied Eli and Danny - CJ (Daniel Zolghadri, Eighth Grade) and Ash (Lachlan Watson, Glen/Glenda in the Chucky TV series) - then trek to find Laura's previous ex-boyfriend, an electrical engineering major named Jonas (Mason Gooding, Cuba Jr's son, Love, Victor) to see if he can help with these conglomerations of household electronics. Also in the mix is a stoner video store clerk, Garret, played by Mooney.
The problem with Y2K is that the script is a half-baked mishmash of other familiar movies. The Eli-Danny dynamic is so cribbed from Superbad that I wasn't surprised to see Jonah Hill has a producer here. The swing from teen buddy comedy to full splatter comedy a la Evil Dead II could've worked in the hands of a better director, but Mooney isn't up to the task.
The script feels like a barely hanging together first draft that needed more trips through development with the most cardboard of characters. How did the killer robots assemble themselves so quickly? Don't know. How did the virus spread when hardly anything was connected to the Internet and broadband was a novelty? Don't know. Why does there seem to be nobody else in the world than the immediate characters in the movie and why is everyone's favorite art house movie brand A24 watering down their reputation with such lackluster stuff? /shrug emoji
While the use of clever puppets and robot suits fabricated by Weta Workshop give a tactile lo-fi vibe, the cinematography by Bill Pope (three Edgar Wright, four Sam Raimi, and four Wachowskis movies including The Matrix trilogy) is too good for this project.
Frankly, if it looked worse and starred nobodies (think: Clerks) it's B-movie story would've worked better. When the best thing about your movie is the surprise cameo of a certain red-hatted nu-metal rocker who was huge in 1999 and is willing to take the piss out of himself for the last act of the movie, that's not a ringing endorsement of Mooney's effort. (FWIW, the missus liked it much more.)
Score: 4/10. Skip it.
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