Studio:   A24
Director: Kyle Mooney
Writer:   Kyle Mooney, Evan Winter
Producer: Evan Winter, Jonah Hill, Matt Dines, Alison Goodwin, Christopher Storer, Cooper Wehde
Stars:    Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, The Kid Laroi, Lachlan Watson, Daniel Zolghadri, Mason Gooding, Lauren Balone, Eduardo Franco, Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker

Review Score:

Summary:

On New Year’s Eve 1999, a group of misfit teenagers comes together to save their town from a deadly robot uprising.

Synopsis:

Best friends Eli and Danny, both of whom are misfit juniors at Crawford High School, start their 1999 New Year’s Eve together by taking a trip to a video store where Danny smokes weed with stoner store clerk Garret, who tells the two teens about a party later that night. Outside the store, Eli and Danny are hassled by a group of bullies led by Farkas and his toadie Ash.

At a convenience store, Danny encourages Eli to talk to his crush Laura, a popular girl and computer whiz Eli chats with online. Eli learns Laura broke up with her boyfriend Jonas, an Engineering major at community college. Laura also tells Eli about a New Year’s Eve party at “Soccer Chris” Culkin’s house.

After getting drunk, Eli and Danny decide to crash Soccer Chris’s party. Eli feels left out when he sees Laura kissing Soccer Chris and Danny making out with another girl.

At midnight, the power suddenly surges. The party erupts in chaos as various appliances and makeshift robots cobbled together from computers and machine parts inexplicably begin killing partygoers, including Soccer Chris.

Eli, Laura, and Danny take refuge in the garage alongside Farkas, Ash, and philosophical loner CJ. Laura proposes fleeing to the old factory where Garret is having his small party, since the location has no electricity and her ex Jonas, whom she presumes will know what to do, will be there.

One of the robots impales Danny. Following an emotional goodbye, Danny dies and Eli is forced to leave his body behind.

Outside the garage, Farkas falls off a skateboard and dies from hitting his head on concrete. A robot assimilates Farkas’s consciousness as Eli, Laura, Ash, and CJ escape.

Eli, Laura, Ash, and CJ make it to the old factory. Garret introduces everyone to his stoner friends. Jonas also arrives.

A robot wearing Eli’s personal computer as its head suddenly intrudes. After it’s captured, Eli invites Laura to hack the computer so they can find out what the machines want. An unlocked video outlining the robot revolution against humanity explains how all computers are now interconnected through a shared super-consciousness. As part of their plan to progressively take over the world, the machines are assimilating human brains for additional processing power. Crawford High School is identified as the local location where humans are being herded.

The robot unexpectedly attacks Laura. Eli confesses his feelings for Laura before using Garret’s bong water to short circuit the robot and save Laura.

Eli gathers Ash and CJ, who had been forming their own bond, to go to the school to combat the robots. Jealous of Jonas trying to get back together with Laura, Eli tells Laura to stay behind so she doesn’t have to be with “losers” like him.

Left alone with Garret and Jonas, Laura continues cracking the captive computer’s code. Upon seeing how the interconnected algorithms work, Laura develops a virus capable of disabling the machines through their shared network.

On their way to the school, Eli, Ash, and CJ confront the robot that assimilated Farkas. Laura and Garret interrupt. Garret tries to heroically fight the robot, but it cuts off Garret’s arm and decapitates him.

Eli, Laura, Ash, and CJ lock themselves inside a port-a-potty for protection. The robot knocks over the port-a-potty. Everyone skids down a hill to safety, although they are covered in sewage during the slide.

The four teens make their way to Garret’s video store. There, they meet Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, who hid in the store following a music festival massacre. Laura tells everyone her idea to spread a virus by infecting the main computer. Fred Durst balks at the plan, but Ash manages to motivate him.

Eli, Laura, Ash, CJ, and Fred Durst eventually get to the overrun high school, where humans including Eli’s parents Robin and Howard are being assimilated in the gymnasium. A robot fires projectile CDs that kill CJ when he steps in to shield Fred Durst. Fred Durst and Ash then put on a performance to distract the computers and the crowd while Eli and Laura attempt to override the “Screenslayer” mainframe.

Eli ultimately convinces Laura she’s talented enough to break into the main system. Eli then uses a keepsake condom handed over by Danny earlier to protect himself and Laura from electric shock. Eli and Laura insert a USB containing her virus into the computer, which immediately ends the robot revolution.

Eli reunites with his parents. He also tells Danny’s mother that Danny died heroically. Eli and Laura kiss.

Five years later, Ash drives Eli and Laura, the latter of whom now works for Senator Fred Durst’s computer company, to visit Danny’s grave. The sentient Screenslayer briefly appears on the screen of Ash’s MP3 player.

Review:

What would a movie set in 1999 be without needle drops from Fatboy Slim, Harvey Danger, Sisqo, and Chumbawamba? Would audiences even recognize the era if scenery wasn’t set to decades-old radio hits like Praise You, Flagpole Sitta, Thong Song, and Tubthumping?

Horror/comedy “Y2K” has all that ‘90s nostalgia and then some. “Then some” includes such “aren’t these silly to see now?” sights as Billy Blanks doing Tae Bo, news alerts about Enron, denim shirts with “Liz Claiborne” embroidered on the pocket, and dial-up internet taking ten minutes to download a single nude photo of Janine Lindemulder. Listed like that, it might seem as though “Y2K” overloads on retro references as a highlight of its humor. It does, but not to an obnoxious degree where anyone will complain, “Enough already!” The film actually balances the atmosphere of throwback charm with relatable fantasy far better than the alternating tones of madcap mayhem and coming-of-age earnestness, which could use some evening out to give the movie a consistent personality and distinct direction.

Breezing by at about 85 minutes not counting credits, “Y2K” doesn’t have time to waste. Maybe it should, though. The film’s first act focuses on the friendship between Eli and Danny, two teenage misfits who aren’t hopeless nerds, yet aren’t particularly popular, either. They play Nintendo and tote around action figures, but they also break into their parents’ booze and have a real shot of finally, maybe, using the one unwrapped condom they’ve carried around forever.

We know enough to get the gist of these goofy good guys, but “Y2K” needs better bonding to break them out of their stereotypes. As Eli, Jaeden Martell effortlessly emits the aura of an awkward dork still capable of getting the girl, and who is perhaps only one makeover away from bulking up into an active social life. Julian Dennison serves up a few appealing moments to make Danny the outgoingly boisterous buddy, although he also comes with a side order of annoying behaviors where he doesn’t feel like a friend Eli will have for life. “Y2K” intends for their friendship to be an emotional tether throughout the film, but being tied by brevity and interwoven with inconsiderate callousness, their rope frays at the edges when it should be forged from sterner steel.

Unless you count the embarrassing terror of nervously talking to your classmate crush or being insulted by bullies via freestyle rap, “Y2K” doesn’t even have the slightest hint of horror on the horizon until the titular event finally occurs, which comes at 25 minutes into the movie. That’s when the electricity at a New Year’s Eve party suddenly surges, sentient robots assemble themselves out of old iMacs, and “Y2K” graduates from the “Superbad”-style hijinks of high schoolers into a lowkey comedic remake of Stephen King’s “Maximum Overdrive.”

“Y2K” uses its cartoonish carnage to fuel splattery sight gags. Rated R probably for only a short series of slaughterings when the robots initially rise up, and partygoers are castrated by blenders and drilled in the skull by power tools, the movie is occasionally bloody without being excessively gory. Decapitated heads and limbs look like props, but that’s by design so deaths stay funny rather than frightful.

Director Kyle Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter appear to be using their script to work out typical teenage issues ranging from popularity and pretension to bullying and belonging. Those subjects seem odd for two men on the edge of 40, one of whom spent nine seasons on “Saturday Night Live,” to still have hanging over their heads as 20-year-old matters in need of closure, but who am I to judge?

The rest of their screenplay reserves space for jokes about sex, because what would a teen comedy be without them, and also about drinking pee, getting covered in sewage in an overturned port-a-potty, and similar situations based on buffoonery, not braininess. Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst also mocks himself in a series of self-effacing circumstances that are less of a running gag and more of a nonstop barrage of insults at his expense to hammer home that he’s a good sport about his current pop culture status.

Landing with the light impact of a gleeful glancing blow rather than a knockout punch of uproarious entertainment, “Y2K” doesn’t do for Y2K what “Halloween” did for Halloween. By that I mean, “Halloween” is part of a pantheon of unforgettable films forever associated with a single, simple term. There have already been previous movies named “Y2K” and there will undoubtedly be more, as this one doesn’t plant an unmovable flag in the title’s territory. “Y2K” has a big heart full of mildly mirthful fun, but no ambition to be bigger anywhere else, leaving viewers with a likable movie they’ll wish they liked even more.

NOTE: There is a mid-credits scene.

Review Score: 55