For most of 2024, Madame Web could boast of being one of the worst movies of the year. Then Y2K came along and said, “Hold my vodka.”
Eli is a nerdy guy who spends a lot of time on America Online Instant Messaging Laura, a girl he’s got a mad crush on. When he asks what she’s doing for New Year’s Eve she gets evasive and that’s that. Eli logs off and goes to his friend Danny’s house, where he finds Danny doing Tae-Bo with his mom.
These two guys head for the video store to rent Junior and hang out in the adult section with Garrett, the stoner store clerk who keeps multiple pairs of Birkenstocks and a weed pipe in the back room. The night is made when Eli and Danny find out Laura’s boyfriend, Soccer Chris, is having a party, and after stuffing a backpack with a boombox, a mix CD, a water bottle filled with vodka, a thumb drive and two action figures, Danny and Eli crash the party.
At first it all seems relatively normal, well, as normal as a high school party can be, and then after midnight hits the machines come to life and start killing everyone. Yeah, people are literally killed by technology. CDs through the face. A Barbie Dream Car burns someone. A microwave melts Soccer Chris’s head. And then for some reason the machines decide to plant chips in everyone’s head so they can control the human race.
Oh, and Fred Durst shows up at the video store. And Eli and Laura slide down a hill with a couple of other kids in a Port-a-Potty, where things get romantic.
Gee, I spent my New Year’s Eve 1999 at my brother’s friend’s mom’s house in Paradise, California, drinking Martinelli’s and playing with my younger niece, hoping the power wouldn’t go off. I think we spent the first minutes after midnight watching Charlotte Church sing, “Just Wave Hello,” and feeling relieved that the apocalypse was averted for the time being.
How to effectively communicate what a massive mess Y2K is? I give it points for the abundance of pop culture references and throwbacks such as Web pages taking forever to load and going to a video store, but pop culture does not a good movie make. Y2K is ill-conceived, trashy, and just plain stupid. Why is Fred Durst in the movie? Who the heck gets romantic in a Port-a-Potty? Why are the adults in this movie so clueless?
OK, that’s a bad pun. Alicia Silverstone plays Eli’s mother, and no, she never says, “As if!” or anything close to it. Such a missed opportunity in a movie pushing late 90s culture. Moving on…
The main problems with Y2K are twofold. One, most of the principal actors were born after Y2K and have no firsthand knowledge of why it was so significant. The fact that everyone was afraid of technology expiring as soon as the calendar flipped is barely mentioned in the movie, so there’s nothing grounding anything. Although they do pay homage to some of the things people were predicting, such as planes falling out of the sky.
Other than that, Y2K is considered an asthetic. It’s the fashion. It’s the music. It’s the dial-up Internet, which, to be honest, a lot of us had discarded by the late nineties. The real Y2K is just a backdrop for what the filmmakers wanted to do, and that brings us to our second problem: The tonal shifts. This movie can’t decide if it wants to be a comedy, a horror movie, or Dazed And Confused. It just throws the characters (and us) around and seems to hope someone will pick up the pieces.
Why do the machines come to life and kill people? Why does Fred Durst sing “Faith” to a bunch of hapless humans who are about to get implanted with microchips? No one knows. It just happens.
On the other hand, though, if Y2K hadn’t shown the machines going berserk, nothing would have happened in this movie. Just like the real Y2K.
Y2K is currently in theaters. Rated R.
My grade: F
Principal Cast: Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, Daniel Zolghadri, Lachlan Watson, Fred Durst, Kyle Mooney, Eduardo Franco, Mason Gooding, The Kid Laroi, Lauren Balone, Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, Maureen Sebastian, Miles Robbins, Ellie Ricker, Jacob Moscovitz, Daniel Dale
Directed by Kyle Mooney.
Written by Kyle Mooney and Evan Winter.
Kyle Mooney is a damned legend. But this movie ain't no good, and he clearly can't direct. I was rooting for this, but man does it not work in any reasonable way.
Fromtheyardtothearthouse.substack.com