Y2K (dir. Kyle Mooney)

by Jack Martin | Mar 23, 2025

Certificate: 18

Running Time: 92 mins

UK Distributor: Universal Pictures

UK Release Date: 21 March 2025

WHO’S IN Y2K?

Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, Daniel Zolghadri, Lachlan Watson, Eduardo Franco, Mason Gooding, Kyle Mooney, Fred Durst, Charlton Howard, Miles Robbins, Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, Jacob Moskovitz, Lauren Balone, Ellie Ricker, Kevin Mangold, Sage Sedlacek

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Kyle Mooney (director, writer), Evan Winter (writer, producer), Matt Dines, Alison Goodwin, Jonah Hill, Christopher Storer and Cooper Wehde (producers), Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans (composers), Bill Pope (cinematographer), David Marks (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

On New Year’s Eve 1999, a tech uprising disrupts a high school party…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON Y2K?

Remember that one Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons that saw Homer inadvertently igniting the Y2K bug and sending the world into technological decline? Now picture that seven-to-eight-minute segment in live-action. And ninety minutes long. And not very funny. Or creative. Or even able to make much sense in its heightened comedic atmosphere.

That’s pretty much what director and co-writer Kyle Mooney’s Y2K is: a largely unfunny extended sketch that can’t even compete with less than half of a Simpsons episode. It’s a shame, because SNL veteran Mooney – making his directorial debut here – has a genuinely strong idea but neither the resources nor the intelligence to back it up, rendering it a missed opportunity outside of giving viewers an endless array of nostalgia for that strange period of time we refer to as the 90s.

Taking place on New Year’s Eve 1999, we follow dorky teen Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his overconfident best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) deciding to crash a high school party where Eli’s crush, popular tech geek Laura (Rachel Zegler), is also in attendance. But as soon as the new millennium rings in, the teens find themselves at the gory mercy of various pieces of self-aware tech that have ignited a full-on uprising against humanity, but not if Eli and his friends can figure out how to stop it.

The problem with Y2K is that it simply doesn’t know how to approach its concept. While it is overall aiming for a comedic vibe, the tone tends to shift frequently as certain characters – even ones who we’re initially led to believe will be around for far longer than they actually are – are killed off in rather brutal fashion, causing everything to stop dead in its tracks as it acknowledges the sudden loss before swiftly moving on to the next bit of laughter. Mooney, who also co-wrote with Evan Winter, seems unsure of what he needs to do in order to balance his competing tones, especially as he utilises more practical animatronic creations that almost give it the vibe of a lo-fi cult midnight movie you’d pay to watch at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, which on the one hand makes it cool to look at but feels as though it’s always at odds with itself over whether we’re supposed to be laughing or genuinely scared. It doesn’t help that Mooney also casts himself in an irritating supporting role that feels like a character from one of his rejected SNL skits, which again clashes with what the film is trying to convey in more tender moments.

Of course, this being a fairly low-budget movie, it’s likely that Mooney had ideas for the movie that he simply wasn’t able to bring to life due to limited costs. However, that leaves the movie he is able to make feeling rather small for something that’s meant to be apocalyptic, with the action happening in such a confined area of space that it barely feels as though anything truly massive is happening outside of it (though some CGI shots of buildings on fire and airplanes colliding mid-air do try to give the situation some scale). As a result, for much of it we’re just following a small group of people who are largely stereotypes of either the era, from the hipster rapper to the Limp Bizkit-worshipping tomboy, or of the teen movie genre as a whole, including the lovesick socially-awkward loser, the rowdy sex-obsessed best friend and the crush who’s also conveniently a whizz at computer hacking. The actors do what they can with their roles, including Rachel Zegler who’s always proving to be one of the best things about anything she does, but the script barely evolves their characters past their most basic attributes, to where you don’t really care whether they all make it out alive by the end.

A saving grace, though, is the rather shocking level of violence that Y2K dishes out to its unsuspecting teens, to where it’s almost surprising that the film isn’t an 18 for some of its gorier moments (instead, it’s an 18 for “brief strong sex” because characters stumble across hardcore porn for just a few seconds). There are some decent kills that make fair use of various pieces of 90s tech, such as sentient Tamagotchi devices and CD discs being thrown around like ninja stars, while sometimes there’ll be an uneasy laughter or two from a character suddenly dying out of pure stupidity, though again the budget restricts them from getting too creative with its weaponry.

Plus, as one might expect from a film like this, there’s plenty of 90s references littered all throughout the movie, including pastimes like browsing VHS tapes in a rental store, playing games on Nintendo 64, logging onto AOL Instant Messenger with that infernal dial-up tone, and of course a soundtrack of late-90s hits by the likes of Limp Bizkit (the frontman of which, Fred Durst, pops up for a late memorable extended cameo). As a 90s kid myself, it was admittedly fun seeing all these things be lovingly recreated by those who similarly lived through that decade, even though knowing that the majority of this film’s cast likely wasn’t even born during that decade makes me feel incredibly old and sad.

Sadly, though, it’s not enough to save this missed opportunity of a comedy that, once again, a Simpsons episode did much better and with a stronger focus on what this alternate apocalypse could have looked like.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Y2K glitches out of providing laughs and thrills in a mostly tired comedy that seems unable to take full advantage of its premise, as debut director Kyle Mooney struggles to balance competing tones on a budget that prevents him from enacting certain ideas in a script that sticks largely to familiar territory rather than challenge itself.