Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, 2026.
Directed by Gore Verbinski.
Starring Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Juno Temple, Dino Fetscher, Georgia Goodman, Dominique Maher, Ethan Saunders, Mike Gassaway, Conrad Kemp, Stevel Marc, Riccardo Drayton, Teddy Holton-Frances, Meghan Oberholzer, Adam Burton, Joe Vaz, Anna Acton, Ryan Kruger, Asim Chaudhry, Tom Taylor, Cassiel Eatock-Winnik, Elly Condron, David Sturzaker, and Artie Wilkinson-Hunt.
SYNOPSIS:
A “Man From the Future” arrives at a diner in Los Angeles where he must recruit the precise combination of disgruntled patrons to join him on a one-night quest to save the world from the terminal threat of a rogue artificial intelligence.
An experience as overstuffed as its clunky film title, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, that director Gore Verbinski almost makes something cohesive and epically satisfying out of Matthew Robinson’s overly ambitious time-travel sci-fi action screenplay is a victory in itself.
There is a gem of an idea that a “man from the future” (played by Sam Rockwell and credited exactly as such), an eccentric neurotic individual donning a plastic trashbag coat with his hand perpetually on a device connected to a bomb strapped to his chest, enters a diner for what we come to find out is almost the 120th consecutive time. He is on a mission that, if it fails, sends him right back to this time and place. His goal is to continuously apply the knowledge from past adventures to assemble the correct team of diner patrons capable of evading local law enforcement and invading the home where an AI supercomputer is mere hours from completion and could wreck the world far beyond what current technology already has.
Don’t get too excited and fixated on this concept, though. The film is less about the trial-and-error of putting together a team and more a series of flow-interrupting flashbacks for select diner patrons to establish their characters, while adding another layer to the world-building. For whatever reason, society’s obsession with technology is already worse than in the real world and is often heightened to a degree that the initial setup doesn’t necessarily need.
There are satirical elements, such as high school students addicted to their phones to the point that teachers can’t even do their jobs and have mostly given up, going on sabbatical. Other unsettling aspects come into play, such as a creepy service that will clone children shot dead in school shootings, bringing them back to life in an uncanny version that, while built across a series of personality prompts (similar to character creation tools and menus in a video game), isn’t quite themselves. They are also forced to recite a couple of ads a day to remain functional.
Among the most intriguing and central to the plot is a young woman (Haley Lu Richardson) dressed as a generic princess born with an analogy to any and all types of technology. In the diner, she is alone, sitting in the corner of the establishment, while she is interested in joining the time traveler’s cause, except she comes across as numb and possibly even suicidal, which is why he never allows her to join. That is, until now.
The team for this attempt consists of a teaching couple in a fractured relationship (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), a confused mother (Juno Temple) of a reanimated robotic child, and some other jokers, less integral to the plot, who are here more for comedic and action purposes. They prove themselves to be useful in different ways, while Sam Rockwell mostly never dials his performance down from nonstop wackiness.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die itself certainly isn’t afraid to get wacky, sometimes to a fault, with an inspired creature that won’t be spoiled, though it somehow feels out of place even in a movie this intentionally tonally jarring. Elsewhere, masked drivers are looking to kill this group for an unknown reason. Beyond that, the team has to sneak around an entire neighborhood without being detected to reach the marked house, then figure out how to infiltrate and upload safeguard features to the AI (destroying it is apparently pointless, as it is inevitable in every timeline).
There is so much plot and so much chaos here that all the appreciable world-building is, unfortunately, in service of a mess. And not that a film synopsis should accurately reflect what a movie is actually about, but what this one sells in its opening 15 minutes is far more tantalizing than what it actually becomes. Yet it is still undeniably inventive, sprawling, exciting, amusing, and crowd-pleasing as it builds to a euphoric “Fuck AI and this future ” finale with perfect line delivery. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has no shortage of compelling ideas and tirelessly conceived world-building, so much so that even at 134 minutes, the film is barely engaging with any of it, mostly trying to force something profound rather than earning it. However, the ride certainly is fun.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
