A delightfully chaotic Sam Rockwell leads a motley crew of skittish recruits against a future in peril in Gore Verbinski’s over-the-top anti-AI screed Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
When a man suddenly appears in a late-night diner looking like a reject from Mad Max, screaming that he needs volunteers to fight a war that will determine the safety of future generations or he’ll blow the whole place sky high, one tends to listen. This man from the future (Rockwell) can’t quite explain what he’s doing or why he needs the help, but it soon becomes very clear that at the very least, the threat of death is real and a handful of diners decide that it’s better to follow him than to be blown to bits.
Among those who have agreed to follow this nutball are teachers Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Mark (Michael Peña), who have seen some really weird things go down at their school that lead them to believe that perhaps the Man isn’t quite as crazy as he sounds, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a social outcast who is mostly just along for whatever this ride turns out to be, and Susan (Juno Temple), a struggling single mom who has a strange feeling that this might actually be real and it is something she needs to do.
The Man, meanwhile, keeps muttering about the fact that he’s been in this exact situation hundreds of times and failed in every attempt to prevent catastrophe. He is looking for just the right combination of acolytes and circumstances that will lead him – and the world – to salvation, and if he doesn’t make it, he’ll just have to nuke the whole operation and start over. It’s like the most consequential video game ever, with real lives and futures at stake.
It’s been nearly a decade since Verbinski blessed the world with his singular vision as a director. His last feature, the fascinating but flawed A Cure for Wellness, didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but it was at the very least something unique in a media landscape where such experiments are often misunderstood (or at least under promoted). In the decade and a half before that, he’d largely found himself mired in existing IP territory, directing some of the most successful films in the Pirates of the Caribbean series and a long since forgotten modern adaptation of The Lone Ranger. He still managed to toss in a couple of passion projects, but Wellness’s underperformance seems to have landed him in director jail until now, and boy has he ever busted out in style.
With the ominous encroaching of artificial intelligence into every aspect of daily life, it is no wonder that it has become fertile ground for sci-fi films over the last fifteen years. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, however, might be the most direct attack on this controversial technology to date. Verbinski’s film from a script by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) is an all-out diatribe against AI, positioning the increasingly ubiquitous tech as the reason for an eventual collapse of humanity.
Rockwell’s Man from the Future is the last buffer against extinction, and his manic temperament reflects a frustration that many around the world suffer as we are beginning to experience the more negative widespread effects of what was once thought to be a boon. This could all be very didactic, and at times it is, Robinson’s script and Verbinski’s direction create an experience that is entertainment-forward without losing a very clear message – AI is going to be the death of us all unless we fight back.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is messy in the way the world is messy right now. The film utilizes its own chaos to mimic the way that the discussion around AI has become disjointed, with different factions each focused on the way this tech will impact different segments of society and the world at large. Less of a leader than a war-weary harbinger, Rockwell’s performance propels this film in directions that are tough to predict, but often a bit too easy to swallow as potential consequences of a future gone mad. Temple brings a level of humanity and empathy to the bombast that the film really needs to stay grounded in a world that is even moderately recognizable. The pair play off of each other beautifully, leading to an emotionally charged climax that is both surprising and somehow inevitable.
In a world where even mid-budget films are becoming more and more dependent on existing IP and AI-sounding loglines and scripts to even get made and released, something like Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is both a breath of fresh air and a giant “screw you” to the business. Verbinski and Rockwell are a match made in movie heaven, a director with a unique sense of visual flair and drama and an actor capable of not only existing in this kind of chaos, but even piercing through it, I’d love to see a dozen more features with these two working this closely. As it stands, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a wildly entertaining, bracingly messy return to the director’s chair, with a message that manages to remain clear throughout the chaos, and you’ve got to respect that.