By George & Josh Bate
It’s been nine long years since Gore Verbinski directed a movie. The filmmaker known for helming the original three Pirates of the Caribbean movies and the English language remake of The Ring hasn’t released a movie since the criminally underrated A Cure for Wellness but now re-enters the fray with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a bizarre and truly original trip that scathingly and hilariously critiques the future we’re heading toward.
Making its world premiere as a secret screening at this year’s Fantastic Fest, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die stars Sam Rockwell as a man who travels from the future to the past to recruit patrons of a Los Angeles diner to help him save the world from a dangerous artificial intelligence.
Although the barebones of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’s premise resemble James Cameron’s Terminator, Verbinski’s latest feature feels distinctly original and of the moment. Verbinski and screenwriter Matthew Robinson tell a cautionary tale of a future marred by complacency set in a world with a darkly comedic, heightened tone. School shootings, social media addiction, and AI are just some of the concepts the film boldly juggles to humorously yet poignantly examine humanity’s growing apathy. The film pokes fun at and satires humanity’s growing desensitization to these issues, while eliciting discomfort in just how close to home its messaging hits and how probable this seemingly crazy version of the future is.
The balance between humor and discomfort represents one of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’s greatest strengths. Played too seriously and the film’s zaniness becomes ill-fitting. But played too humorously and the serious themes it examines lose their impact. Robinson, who previously wrote The Invention of Lying and Love and Monsters, ensures neither scenario is the case with a razor sharp script deftly in tune to the tone this kind of film requires.
Leading the ensemble and deftly towing the line of the film’s tone is Sam Rockwell. At this point in his career, there’s clearly nothing the Academy Award winning actor can’t do. Few performers nail comedic tight and dramatic beats as organically and endearingly as Rockwell, acting muscles the actor gets to flex here. Rockwell plays beautifully into the film’s bizarreness and eccentricity with his decidedly weird character from the future. The character, having tried over 100 times to recruit patrons from this diner to save the world, knows the ins and outs of the patrons, which puzzles them and creates an array of great comedic moments. But, when the film gets more serious, Rockwell more than meets the challenge. He possesses such a natural manner of line delivery that dramatic sequences feel so real and earned. It’s the kind of covertly nuanced performance that should generate awards attention but probably won’t.
Rockwell is backed by an impressive ensemble, consisting of Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, Zazie Beetz, and Michael Peña. The four play unsuspecting patrons of the diner who Rockwell recruits (for the most part, involuntarily) for his mission to save the world. Vignettes that take us into the four characters’ past allow us to learn about their lives that led them to the diner on that fateful day and make Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die far from a one-man-show. Temple and Richardson, in particular, are given rich material to work with and effective emotional arcs of their own. While Temple’s arc concludes a bit unsatisfactorily, Richardson’s arc culminates spectacularly and arguably gives the film its emotional heart.
Time travel often becomes unwieldy and convoluted in film and television, issues Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die brilliantly subverts. The film never gets bogged down in overexplaining how Sam Rockwell’s character is able to journey to the past and just how the future is changed by manipulating the past. Instead, Verbinski’s film keeps it simple in this regard with a succinct, coherent explanation for how time travel works, which, in turn, enables the audience to hone in more so on the film’s characters and plot while not getting bogged down in bloated exposition.
For as close to home as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’s prophesied doomed future is, Verbinski crafts a genuinely and delightfully bizarre feature. This becomes abundantly clear within the first few moments, which see Sam Rockwell’s eccentric, plastic sheet-wearing, bomb-wielding character enter a diner to recruit patrons for a mission to save the world. As the film delves into the backgrounds of specific patrons through vignettes, its oddities continue to evidence themselves as we see just how crazy the world has become. On the surface, the present day in which the film is set looks and sounds like ours, but these vignettes highlight how, seemingly within just a few years, things get decidedly (and humorously, in a twisted manner) out of hand.
In the final act, Verbinski ramps up the weirdness tenfold. The ending goes bigger and more unusual, parts a tad too much, especially as not every bizarre occurrence that occurs is fully explained. Admittedly, these swings are easier to give given the heightened world this story exists in, but it nonetheless poses questions of plausibility that distract from the film’s messaging.
The final act also features a twist that sees the movie go more ambitious and just somewhat convoluted. The stakes are amplified as the true extent of the threat reveals itself to the characters and, in turn, the audience, although it all becomes just a bit too much and grand in the end.
The movie manages to gather itself again, however, with the ultimate message it lands on. Verbinski’s film is staunchly, unapologetically anti-AI, with the filmmaker’s disdain for the technology seeping through every scene. Despite the more frivolous tone, there’s a lot on the line if Rockwell and his team don’t accomplish their mission and yet Verbinski avoids too cynical of a message in orchestrating what is ultimately a deeply human story. Despite the horrors that come from our enslavement to technology, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die proves moving in its final note and, most impactfully, hopeful.
VERDICT: 8/10
The fourth and final secret screening of Fantastic Fest did not disappoint. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Gore Verbinski’s first film in nine years, is a truly original and bizarre trip that scathingly and hilariously critiques the future we’re heading toward. Boldly and creatively addressing school shootings, social media addiction, and AI in a vibrant, coherently told time travel tale, the film proves unafraid to get delightfully weird with its story and visuals. Despite the story becoming a bit too grand and unwieldy in the final act, Verbinski excels in nailing a heightened world full of apathy and desensitization that hits all too close to home. Sam Rockwell nails both dramatic and comedic moments with a phenomenal, awards-worthy performance that showcases the Academy Award winning actor’s one-of-a-kind organic line delivery. Juno Temple and Hailey Lu Richardson also impress in key supporting roles, the latter of which arguably gives the film its emotional heart. Although not a horror movie, this is as scary and relevant as modern cinema gets in looking to the future, but it’s also a film imbued with incredible heart and even hope. Gore Verbinski has crafted a distinctly of-the-moment movie here that somehow proves as crowd-pleasingly entertaining as it is deeply relevant.