'Y2K' REVIEW: More Mining Personal Nostalgia for Coming of Age Content [3/5]
Kyle Mooney Turns His Generation's Big Nothing Into An Off-Beat Horror Something
[Rating 3/5] - dir. Kyle Mooney - 2024 - United States - R - 1h 31m - Horror/Comedy
SNL cast member-director-actor Kyle Mooney is hard to pin down on the iconic weekly sketch show. There’s a little Andy Kaufman… A little Fred Armisen… A little Norm MacDonald, even — performers you can’t quite wrap your arms around. Where do their characters (or perhaps better said, their comedy) end and their true selves begin? Is it true like it appears that part of what these men may find funniest is exactly that kind of confusion?
Put one of those types at the helm of a film, and if they’re comfortable with the medium, it comes out just as weird. Like a bizarro thumbprint.
Y2K takes place in, of course, 1999. All the fears of what will happen to computers, and all computer systems (think transit disasters, stock market crashes), are in the air, coming down on people like a sickness. This is all background to what in the foreground looks a hell of a lot like your pretty typical coming of age teen sex comedy — or at least a polite, well-researched imitation of one. Later, in true horror fashion, Y2K takes things further, joyfully jumping any sense of a proverbial shark and landing in a zone free of much other expectation.
Director Kyle Mooney has been confounding audiences long before SNL. In a viral seemingly on-the-whim sketch video, Mooney portrays someone you might call… “That guy”. Everybody knows “that guy”. In this case “that guy” is also “that stoner guy”. He speaks to the camera, or more specifically through the camera. It hits all the right, true notes to make it as uncomfortable as it is funny. Mooney’s comedy is like a hit to the funny bone. What kind of feeling is this? Is it on purpose? Is it good or bad?
Here, he wields his Gen Z cast (Rachel Zegler, Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison, …Fred… Durst…) smartly, using them as prisms through which his offbeat ideas don’t seem quite as offbeat and unmanageable — at no expense to the comedy, which is unsurprisingly the film’s strong point (it is not scary, fortunately or unfortunately). I laughed out loud multiple times, often at the stupidest moments. About halfway through there’s a needle drop of Limp Bizkit’s “Break Shit” to accompany a skateboarding trick. That’s all.
Mooney embodies a sketch character kind of comedy, even when he’s in a major motion picture, as They used to say.
Helpfully, Gen Z themselves are game. Without Zegler and co., this would be a lot of hot air.
I’m relatively ambivalent about this film. There’s nothing wrong with it, and much I enjoyed. But Mooney’s creative comedy reputation precedes his creations now and I’m unsure this really achieves as highly as I wanted it to achieve.
If Mooney creates something incredible down the line, this film’s stature will rise, and people will retrospectively see in it “future greatness.” If Mooney flames out, and SNL remains his creative peak (or, in my opinion, the stoner music festival guy), this kinda film might be used as an example of why less money should go to small, original scripts.
That’s the scariest part of all of this.
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P.S. I’ve been around long enough now to see a few waves of the coming of age thing. They’ve got this down to a science. I mean, as a 31 year old, this is just Superbad to me, which to others was just American Pie, which to others was just the 80s sex comedies, which to others was just…
I’m tired.
P.P.S. It’s a fun soundtrack for this Millennial’s taste.
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‘Y2K’ is streaming now.
Selected Movie Quote: “I mean… effects of MDMA on brain matter are still under broad dispute. …The science just be, like, hella un-rigorous.”
[Rating 3/5] - dir. Kyle Mooney - 2024 - United States - R - 1h 31m - Horror/Comedy