Y2K: Good Ideas, Poor Execution

Every time I hear the name "Fred Durst," I can't help but think of that one line from Eminem's The Real Slim Shady. And whether that's a good thing or not can be up to your own interpretation. However, what won't be up to very many people's differing interpretations is the quality of A24 and director Kyle Mooney's latest movie, titled Y2K. Yes, someone made a movie about what would happen if the infamous theoretical Y2K bug had gone homicidal, and critics and audiences alike seem to have been united in dislike of the movie, even if they may have different reasons for disliking it. In case you're wondering, I disliked the movie too. I disliked it because I deemed it to be shallow and underdone, and others will probably dislike it just because it happens to have Rachel Zegler in it. Relax, her acting job was fine. It might be my job as a critic to hate everything (I'm kidding....mostly), but it certainly isn't my job to hate everyone. Anyway, this review is going to be a tad shorter than some of my other work on this blog, because this movie isn't very long either, and frankly, I'm kind of just ready to move on and watch something else, because I am thoroughly disappointed in the way that Y2K turned out.

Y2K is a comedy-horror film from A24 that follows high school students Eli, Danny, and Garrett as they try to make plans for New Year's Eve in the year 2000. Eli has a crush on one of the girls in his class, Laura, but is too scared to make a move on her. Typical high schooler drama, I know. However, not many of these first-world problems matter once the last three dates on the digital calendars change from 999 to 000, giving appliances a sudden thirst for human blood.

I must say, even though this has become standard for A24 movies, Y2K is a very creative movie, and I appreciate its commitment to a never-before-realized vision. For all of its flaws, I've never seen anything quite like Y2K, and I appreciate the movie's sheer ambition and unapologetically bombastic vision, so even if some may have understandably criticized this tone as messy, I appreciate the we-don't-care approach on display here, even if that appreciation may be fleeting. And on a storytelling level, the opening act of Y2K is actually pretty solid. The foundation of this movie has one goal; to set up its characters and then pit them against killer machines. And because it sticks to a simple concept, it doesn't really allow itself any room for error as far as its opening moments go. It's a safe strategy, but initially effective. However, the film stops being effective very quickly when pretty much anything at all is demanded of it by its own plot, and the film starts to make some bad decisions very early on in its runtime, namely offing some characters it didn't have much of any narrative reason to, rendering a lot of character dynamics that had been established ineffective. In short, the movie has some good ideas but exhausts them very quickly before it gets anywhere, so it soon jumps to cheap and schlocky shock factor to try and fill in some narrative holes, ineffectively and even detrimentally if I may. This gave me the impression that the writers just kind of gave up when they hit a challenge, and while that does legitimately feel kind of mean to say, I say it because I got the feeling that some of the less-than-desirable aspects that pop up in the middle and latter acts of this movie feel exactly like writing techniques I would reach for if I were running out of ideas while working on a screenplay.

Of course, Fred Durst eventually showing up as himself (spoiler, but you knew that if you saw the trailer) does breathe some life back into the movie for a time, but even his star power is not enough to save Y2K from a quick and decisive condemnation to death at the hands of the critical kind as well as from audiences, and as I'd come to expect from the movie, it didn't spend much time to meditate on the musician either and rushed on to other plot points without taking any time to rest on things that did work for it. I almost wonder if Y2K would have been better off adding a handful of plot threads and maybe even some extra groups of survivors, and going with a miniseries format instead because maybe it wouldn't have been so barebones and narratively shallow if it did. Either that or the writers could have spent some more time on the project in the first place.

All in all, Y2K is a bunch of good and zany ideas that were brought together with severely wanting execution. Nothing is elaborated on as thoroughly as it should have been, and even though the movie does have some good aspects, namely a relatable if lukewarm lead in the form of Eli, a creative idea, and a killer aesthetic, the execution of the film is poor to barely acceptable in just about every way, and to be completely honest with you, I'm struggling to reach the word count I want to with this article because there's just so little to say about this movie. Nothing in Y2K is treated with the time or consideration it deserves to be treated with, and so even if this film swings big, it still misses and misses big at that. Throw in a surprisingly high f-word count for a movie with a runtime of a mere hour and thirty-one minutes, as well as a surprisingly explicit pornographic video used twice for shock-based humor and one brief sequence of a topless woman sitting at a computer, and this just all adds up to one movie I would steer you clear from, and you can pick your poison here: objectionable content or a lack of any real substance.

Being a critic, I'm personally more offended by the latter.

Y2K - 5/10

Genesis 11:6-9