Y2K

Grade: D

If you’re old enough to remember, the transition into Y2K was a non-event. All the stuff people were paranoid and worried might happen didn’t come to pass. This film is a “what if it did” fantasy. It’s a pathetic spurt or spasm of a movie. As a film reviewer, I’m here to remind you of the mess it leaves. I really don’t recommend it, even if you were the ages of these characters on New Year’s Eve 1999. It seemed like this was made for people like me. They can have it back. I’ll do you a favor and quote two lines I liked. When a kid mumbles something in response to a bully giving him a hard time, the instigator says “What was that? I don’t speak Bitch-ass.” And I enjoyed an easy-to-miss bit of dialogue in the background. “Do you ever listen to yourself?” “I listen to your mom [performing a hand service on me].”

If you thought the trailer jam-packed as many 1990s pop culture references as possible, the actual film largely does, too. When a few characters are walking through the woods at night, they miss an opportunity to talk about the Blair Witch – but other than that, it’s wall-to-wall callbacks. It begins on December 31, 1999, as high school junior Eli is waiting patiently through the internet dial-up sound that will connect him to AOL. After “Welcome. You’ve got mail.” – he watches a shaky, pixelated video of President Clinton addressing the potential Y2K bug. After chatting with his crush, Laura, on Instant Messenger, he gets hit with her “away message,” and his self-made compilation CD is finished burning.

Characters are set up in the usual raunchy teen comedy style. Everyone we meet is at the same party, living the vida loca. We know what will happen, and we wait for the other shoe – and the ball – to drop. Once the new millennium hits, electronics come to life and pick off the teenagers alarmingly quickly. The norm in slasher/horror movies is to have the characters survive a surprising amount of injuries and keep on trucking. Here, it doesn’t take much for them to get knocked down, and not get up again. A VCR spits out a cassette of Varsity Blues (taped from TV), and a hit to the forehead is enough to take one particular person down. In one inexplicable kill, a blender cuts up a guy in the most uncomfortable place. Why was he holding it there? I don’t know. A blender is pretty deep. Was there enough of “him” to reach the blade? Apparently so. A couple of people that I came the closest to liking don’t make it very far into the movie.

What drew me to see Y2K was the promise of 90s nostalgia, and Rachel Zegler (as Laura), one of our best rising stars. After playing Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, she landed a leading role in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, and she’s currently playing Juliet on Broadway. Eli is played by Jaeden Martell – from Arcadian, Knives Out, and the 2017/2019 IT movies. He has that Family Ties era Michael J. Fox likability. In some novelty stunt casting, Alicia Silverstone is Eli’s mother, and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst (recently in I Saw the TV Glow, one of the best movies of the year) shows up as himself. Everybody always says his first and last name, as if he’s a surprise guest on an old variety show. “What would you do, Fred Durst?” “Fred Durst, I’ve had a bad night.” “Run, Fred Durst!”

They find out what the machines are planning to do via a video commercial that plays for the human characters, supposedly made for them as a courtesy. There’s absolutely no reason for it to exist otherwise. Y2K, billed as a horror comedy, isn’t funny or scary, and has a disjointed screenplay. There’s an argument between Eli and Laura, to shoehorn in some conflict before they make up. There sure are a lot of words, and very few are comprehensible. Or maybe I just don’t speak Bitch-ass.

Grade: D