Set on New Year's Eve 1999, Eli (Jaeden Martell) along with his best/only friend Danny (Julian Dennison) are constantly on the outside looking in when it comes to their high school social circle. Tired of sitting on the sidelines Eli decides to attend a New Year's party hosted at a popular kid's house in the hopes of finally getting the attention of his dream girl Laura (Rachel Zegler). Faced with humiliation once again, Eli lets the clock count down to midnight only for all havoc to break loose as the Y2K bug turns out to be all too real leading to every piece of electronic equipment turning itself into a killing machine. As the house of overrun with killer robots, Eli, Laura, Danny, and some others team-up to try and survive the technological apocalypse.
Y2K comes to us from director and co-writer Kyle Mooney, a former cast member of Saturday Night Live who'd previously made quite the impression with the independently produced dramedy Brigsby Bear which he co-wrote and starred in. Mooney writes the script along with first time writer Evan Winter (who comes from a background in music videos) and on paper there's a good premise for Y2K that promises over-the-top genre fun, but in execution the film becomes an obnoxious sit ripe with jarring tonal issues and annoying characters that results in a creative misfire.
In terms of describing exactly what Y2K is: while the marketing has led many to compare it to Small Soldiers, a more apt comparison would probably be Maximum Overdrive by way of Superbad (even Jonah Hill is a listed producer on the film so I speculate he may have helped to craft some of the film's tone). I really don't have any slights against the film's cast as they all work with what they're given and have (mostly) shown themselves to be good in prior projects, but they're also playing such aggressively annoying late 90s/early 2000s archetypes who are defined by one major character trait if at all. The usually reliable Jaeden Martell and Julian Dennison seem like they're good together and would probably do better in another project, but they really come off as repackages of Seth and Evan from Superbad without any of the development those two had as the movie is more focused on cramming in 90s references for window dressing. Rachel Zegler's main role is basically being a hacker and doesn't have any real dimension aside from being popular and a fixation of Eli's and the rest of the cast are playing broad archetypes who are defined by one character trait. We also get a lengthy appearance by Fred Durst playing himself which isn't nearly as amusing as it seems to think it is.
I will say that the Weta Workshop designed machines look pretty good as humanoid amalgamations of household objects and there are some fun things done with the machines, but in a case of a film far outreaching its grasp Y2K actually tries to be serious at points and make you mourn the loss of "characters" in the film. This is a major point against Y2K because it'll alternate between crude raunchy high school shenanigans and dialogue and then try to have serious death moments complete with mournful music even when the characters die by stupidity that has nothing to do with the robot apocalypse. The climax that features the AI hivemind The Construct who speaks with the vernacular of a brain damaged frat bro is yet another instance of the movie's failed attempts to build meaningful drama in a maelstrom of annoying and crass vulgarity trying and failing to be humorous.
I was really looking forward to Y2K given the rich material and talent both in front of and behind the camera, but sometimes even with all the right ingredients you can still end up with something that just doesn't work. I wish the cast and crew well, but I can't recommend this film on any level.
