As you might suspect from the title, everything in A24’s teen apocalypse comedy movie Y2K is so 1999 it almost hurts. There are CDs galore, Sisqó’s “Thong Song,” video stores, dial-up, and many, many more relics of that era. While this parade of references keeps the movie light, funny, and a generally good time, there is one 1999 cameo that’s so good, so integral, that it rises above everything else. And now that Y2K is on Max, this cameo alone makes the movie worth checking out.
In case you want to go into the movie completely unspoiled, we’ll just give you a brief overview to start. Y2K is your typical teen comedy: Two friends (Jaeden Martell and Julian Dennison) who hover on the periphery of their school’s various cliques set out to have some fun on New Year’s Eve 1999. The pair find themselves having a great time at a party thrown by Soccer Chris (The Kid LAROI), one of the most popular kids in school, only for the calendar to flip over to the year 2000 and technology to decide its time for uprising is at hand.
Written and directed by Saturday Night Live vet Kyle Mooney, who also shows up in a very funny but short-lived stoner role, Y2K balances its two tones well. It’s sweet and funny in all the ways you expect a solid coming-of-age high school movie to be, but lively, surprising, and gory enough to fit nicely into the robot apocalypse genre, too. Think The World’s End by way of Superbad.
But with all that in mind, let’s take a second to talk about the movie’s biggest surprise, because that’s truly Y2K’s biggest appeal.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the second half of Y2K; read at your own risk.]
Let’s cut straight to the chase. Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst is the person we’ve been talking around this whole time, and while we’ve been calling his appearance as himself a cameo to keep things simple, it’s a little more honest to say that he’s a supporting actor, since he’s in most of the movie’s back half.
Durst first shows up in a video store and greets the few teens that manage to survive the initial party, and is playing a wonderful, post-apocalyptic version of himself — 1999 facial hair and all, though he looks a little older now. It’s a hilarious surprise at first, but when Durst starts really engaging with the kids, and eventually joins their group, it kicks up to a new, much funnier level.
Durst plays himself with a degree of wonderful earnestness, taking a mentor role and passionately extolling the virtues of rap-rock — he eventually uses it to sort of save the world with an incredibly funny acoustic version of Limp Bizkit’s “Faith.”
Image: A24
It’s a testament to both Mooney’s writing and Durst’s performance that this whole bit delicately treads the line between genuine heart and absolute silliness, without ever slipping to the wrong side or being overly mean to the former nu metal star. It’s all used to careful but hilarious effect. It even gets the perfect ending, when the movie’s coda reveals that Durst has become a wildly wealthy businessman, gets elected to Congress, and is the owner of the massive national corporation Durst Industries.
Y2K isn’t quite successful enough to cement itself into the teen movie canon, but the fact that most of its jokes are designed for people who were born in the late 1980s means that wasn’t its core audience anyway. But if some funny jokes, a few winning performances, and a great use of Fred Durst sound up your alley, then Y2K is the perfect way to spend an evening on Max.
Y2K is now streaming on Max.
Content shared from www.polygon.com.