Vague Visages’ Y2K review contains minor spoilers. Kyle Mooney’s 2024 movie on Amazon and Apple features Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler and Julian Dennison. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Y2K clumsily tries to recreate the cinematic glory years of its co-producer Jonah Hill — the break-out star of the 2007 teen comedy classic Superbad. Directed by Saturday Night Live veteran Kyle Mooney, the 91-minute film recycles a tried-and-true formula (the archetypal Nerdy Kid hopes to impress the archetypal Cool Girl) while riffing on one of the most popular thematic trends right now: the threat of artificial intelligence. There’s simply not enough star power in Y2K to match Superbad’s success, and it doesn’t help that the director/co-screenwriter underutilizes his most talented cast member, Rachel Zegler. Unsurprisingly, too, Mooney overstuffs the first act with nostalgic needle-drops to easily hook unassuming millennial audiences. Remember a few years ago when Saturday Night Live’s writers catered specifically to far-left trends? That’s Y2K — a film that checks off sociopolitical boxes with its stoner surrealism and recycled ideas for a Gen Z crowd.

In Y2K, the first act structure mirrors Superbad’s narrative design. Two male outcasts — a shy, skinny boy (Jaeden Martell as Eli) and a large, boisterous kid (Julian Dennison as Danny) — get bullied before a big house party while drooling over the local Manic Pixie Dream Girl (the aforementioned Zegler as Laura). With that familiar premise in place, Mooney subverts expectations with a horror twist, in which sentient technology targets human beings on New Year’s Eve 1999. If all the mainstream needle-drops weren’t enough to lure nostalgic viewers, the screenwriters make Limp Bizkit and lead singer Fred Durst a centerpiece of the second half. And with all due respect to Martell and Dennison — two accomplished actors — Y2K would’ve been more appealing with Zegler and Lachlan Watson (credited fifth as a sexually confused Limp Bizkit fan named Ash) as the primary leads. After all, what made Superbad so special back in 2007? For many, I assume, it’s that the aforementioned Hill and Stone seemed like genuine movie stars back then, even though they were relatively complete unknowns, unless you remember the former actor from The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) and the latter performer from The New Partridge Family (2005). Zegler and Watson display the same type of charisma in Y2K, but they unfortunately don’t receive enough material to jumpstart the film’s weakest sections. Also, it’s too bad that Saturday Night Live’s most hilarious performer, Sarah Sherman, didn’t receive a supporting role to counterpoint the bro-style comedy.

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Mooney, who made his feature directorial debut with Y2K, seemingly needed more time in the editing room to polish his filmmaking style. As a comedic performer, he excels through subtle and self-deprecating humor that Saturday Night Live fans like myself anticipate when he appears in sketches. In a mainstream feature film, though, some of the ha-ha stoner stuff needs more meat on the bone, otherwise Mooney’s low-brow jokes — executed through blatant dialogue and subtle visual gags — won’t land with viewers unfamiliar with his style. It’s also a bit confusing when Zegler’s Laura is positioned as a coding whiz who doesn’t like music but then leads an impromptu group performance of Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” during Y2K’s second half. The moment comes across as a convenient spotlight for the talented actress, who famously won a competition to star as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (2021) before landing a singing role in the 2023 franchise film The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Y2K has plenty of LOL moments, yet they all feel slapped together like underdeveloped Saturday Night Live sketch ideas on a writing room wall.

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It’s worth noting that Mooney enlisted veteran cinematographer Bill Pope (1999’s The Matrix, 2004’s Spider-Man 2) for Y2K. The film does indeed boast a distinct artistic touch when all hell breaks loose during the first act, but — like so many comedic surrealists — Mooney hits the gas a bit too much when the audience theoretically needs time to process all the information. Wisely, though, the director minimizes the featured needle-drops during Y2K’s second half. But when the movie turns thematically dark, however, so too do the visuals during exterior sequences, which makes the narrative itself feel more like a slog than a lively cinematic experience. I imagine that Mooney most likely pitched Y2K as a mash-up of Superbad and current trends, and that’s exactly how it goes down — a bunch of derivative gags in a feature film format for nostalgic pop culture consumers. Is this the way of the future? I hope not.

Q.V. Hough (@QVHough) is Vague Visages’ founding editor. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film essays at Vague Visages.

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