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Y2K Will Make You Nostalgic for a Funnier Comedy
SNL alum Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut is audacious in concept but pretty slapdash in execution.
Mooney, who was a teenager in ’99 too, otherwise treats his directorial debut like a time capsule of late-20th-century touchstones: burned CDs and VHS rentals, Bill Clinton jokes and N64 marathons, group sing-alongs to “Thong Song” and “Tubthumping.” If you have any lingering affection for any of this stuff, you’re likely to crack a few smiles over the course of the film, though bigger laughs may elude even the target demographic of nostalgic elder millennials. The brash cutup here is Danny (Julian Dennison, the young Kiwi star of Hunt for the Wilderpeople), who convinces Cera-like bestie Eli (Jaeden Martell, from the It movies) to bail on their New Year’s Eve plans to watch the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy Junior and instead go to a huge house party thrown by one of their classmates. And while Mooney attempts to wring some pathos from unexpected deaths, all he really does is give the audience whiplash: This is much too broad a yukfest to get us invested in the fates of its teen heroes, a gaggle of jokey adolescent types like the aggro skater (Eduardo Franco), the pretentious hipster raphead (Daniel Zolghadri), and the popular dream girl ( West Side Story ’s Rachel Zegler) who’s actually cool and neurotic.
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