I was admittedly nervous about Y2K, the former Saturday Night Live cast member Kyle Mooney’s feature directorial debut, as the once prosperous SNL-to-feature film pipeline has run dry in recent years; from the Please Don’t Destroy boys’ throwaway Peacock film to Pete Davidson’s King of Staten Island, the show’s sketch artists have struggled to expand their schtick to fill more than five minutes. But Mooney, who built a loyal YouTube following in the 2000s with his sketch group Good Neighbor before spending nine years on a show that rarely knew how to properly wield his talents, has long demonstrated the awkward comic sensibility and just plain weirdness to pull it off. Y2K, a disaster comedy co-written with Evan Winter and produced by A24, is a promising if wildly uneven debut that banks heavily, often successfully, on Mooney’s penchant for late 90s nostalgia.
The turn-of-the-century details are so thick and lovingly deployed, in fact, that you’d be forgiven for initially mistaking the movie as a charming if tongue-in-cheek coming-of-age portrait; the opening shots are a very accurately rendered (as far as this mid-2000s AIM user can tell) AOL dial-up computer screen, all pixelated images, slow downloads and chat windows. The film is a constant whack-a-mole of references that, for the nostalgia prone, are a fun game of I Spy: Edwin McCain, Green Day, a Warped Tour 99 sticker, That 70s Show, the macarena, Enron, a rainstick. Alicia Silverstone plays a mom.
