Y2K (18)

As a new millennium beckons, best friends Danny, Eli and Garrett discuss plans to celebrate the new year. Eli is pining for classmate Laura, who already has a boyfriend, and he decides to crash a party that Laura is attending with her friends Madison, Raleigh and Trevor. A power blackout shortly after midnight heralds the emergence of sentient machines and electronic devices, which are intent on killing mankind.

LondonNet Film Review

Y2K (18) Film Review from LondonNet

Party like it’s 1999 with first-time director Kyle Mooney’s uneven horror comedy set as a curtain falls on the 20th century, when burning CD mixes was de rigueur, tell-tale chirrups of dial-up modems heralded agonisingly slow intetnet access and social media wasn’t even a glimmer on the horizon. Simpler and, in some ways, happier times. I have vivid memories of December 31, 1999 and media-fuelled hysteria about the so-called Y2K bug, which was predicted to wreak havoc on computer systems around the world that might misinterpret the new two-digit year as 1900. After months of feverish doom-mongering, the dawning of a new millennium delivered precious few technical gremlins. The lights stayed on and our overpopulated third rock from the Sun continued to turn…

In Mooney’s picture, nightmarish predictions are realised and an “interconnected super-consciousness” gives birth to sentient machines and electronic devices on a mission to kill puny humans. A Tamagotchi fuses with a hand drill, a motorised bed catapults one unfortunate soul to eternal slumber and an electric blender targets fleshy parts to whirr to a crimson pulp. In the midst of mayhem, a script co-written by Mooney and Evan Winter lurches awkwardly from buddy comedy and stomach-churning horror to heart-tugging tragedy, building to a lacklustre final stand galvanised by words of wisdom from Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst. The end of the world should be more exciting than this.

Best friends Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison) resolve to gatecrash a New Year’s Eve party attended by peers from Crawford High School and – just maybe – kiss a girl. Popular classmate Laura (Rachel Zegler), the unattainable object of Eli’s desires, will be there, pursued by the host of the party, Chris (Charlton Howard). Shortly after the countdown to midnight, there is a temporary power outage and various appliances and gadgets come to life, under the control of a centralised intelligence that intends to use the electricity from human brains as a power source for the mechanised uprising.

Danny, Eli and Laura escape the initial onslaught along with hip hop crew buddies Ash (Lachlan Watson), CJ (Daniel Zolghadri) and Farkas (Eduardo Franco). Survivors identify an old factory outside town as a sanctuary because the property doesn’t have electricity. En route, Eli suggests Ash should destroy her beloved video camera before it rebels against her. “That’s like, racism against machines,” she angrily retorts.

Y2K is a well-meaning misadventure that can’t clearly articulate its genre-melding intentions. Dennison is a powder keg of irresistible exuberance and every time he is off screen, the party poops. In the final 30 minutes, Mooney’s picture feels as agonisingly slow as downloading a picture before the arrival of broadband.

– Kim Hu