Gore Verbinski’s bombastic return to the big screen starts with a bang — well, more accurately, a trickle. It’s not easy to forget that this is the same man who delivered three gonzo Pirates of the Caribbean movies when his mysterious protagonist (Sam Rockwell) storms into a diner in the heart of Los Angeles, swathed in a plastic raincoat and covered in a series of tubes and wires... one of which empties a splash of urine onto the linoleum.
Rockwell’s unnamed protagonist feels a lot like Jack Sparrow by way of Kyle Reese: he claims to hail from the future, determined to save humanity from the artificial intelligence that robbed us of our dignity — but he could just as easily have wandered in from the dark side of Hollywood Boulevard. If there’s a line between guy-next-door charm and straight-up psychosis, he’s playing jump rope with it. By the time we first meet him in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, he’s traveled back in time on over a hundred occasions. He’s returned to Norm’s Diner in his 118th attempt to fix the future, but he can’t do it alone. He needs the perfect combination of people, plucked from the diner patrons cowering in fear and confusion, to join him in his fight against the apocalypse. There are millions of combinations to run through, but he’s not deterred. If it doesn’t work this time around, he’ll just use one of the weird switches attached to his suit (which may or may not be powered by a bomb) to start all over again.
Good Luck, Have Fun runs on a voracious mix of gonzo sci-fi spectacle and grounded, cynical sentiment. Verbinski, directing a joke-a-minute script written by Matthew Robinson, clearly believes in the crusade of his Man from the Future. The story he builds around Rockwell’s wacky lead isn’t subtle in its convictions: if Everything Everywhere All At Once embraced the absurd, Good Luck, Have Fun goes to fourth base. It’s the first film Verbinski’s helmed in eight years, and it’s appropriately stocked with the ideas, condemnations, and hopes that the director has no doubt been nursing for the better half of a decade. As a result, his many concepts don’t always land — but as the sardonic wake-up call humanity needs, it’s refreshingly right on time.
The Man from the Future is, mercifully, not totally without reason. He knows that on some level, artificial intelligence is inevitable. But with the necessary safeguards in place, it can be stopped from enslaving humanity. The malevolent AI in Good Luck, Don’t Die feels like the bastard child of Skynet and Meta: it begins with social media, an endless feed of short-form content designed to microwave our brains. It’s already blurred the lines between what’s real and what isn’t, but it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
Somewhere in the city, a 9-year-old boy is building the mother of all AI. Rockwell’s hero has been sent to install a counterprogram to keep his superintelligence on the right track. He’s only got about an hour before the world changes for good; there’s no telling how a random, assuming group of strangers will help him reach his destination, but it’s a question that Good Luck, Don’t Die has a lot of fun (maybe too much fun?) answering.
The soft-spoken Susan (Juno Temple) and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), an icy, punk-rock chick in a princess gown, are the only volunteers for this apparent suicide mission. The Man from the Future takes the rest of his recruits — two high school teachers (Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña), an indignant Uber driver (Asim Chaudhry), a Boy Scout troop leader, and a woman who just wanted a slice of pie — as hostages. As their hellish night progresses, each is forced to step up to the plate in different ways. Some help flesh out the many pitfalls of this near-future through flashbacks: Ingrid is the only girl alive who is allergic to both cell phones and WiFi, giving her the least to lose in this battle against AI. Janet (Beetz) and Mark (Peña) have also seen the perils of social media first-hand. They recount an exhausting day in their lives, corralling students who only take their heads out of their phones to hurl ageist insults at their teachers or take cover from a school shooting.
Mass shootings are a daily constant in this world — Susan just lost her son in a different, but no less recent shooting — and the cornerstone for the film’s most emotionally heavy sequences. Verbinski and Robsinson double down on the numbing effect of such constant bloodshed — but they also take the time to explore the macabre irony buried under all that tragedy, resulting in some impossibly funny gags. With the help of a vapid parent support group and a sci-fi twist that feels ripped from Mickey 17, Good Luck, Have Fun charts a path into our seemingly inevitable fate.
It’s easy to laugh at the disparate portraits of a bizarre, familiar future, but stitching these vignettes together is one of the bigger challenges Verbinski faces. Good Luck, Have Fun may rely too much on backstory to build out its world, but it’s all in the service of a bombastic, explosive climax. It’s all systems go once all the set-up is out of the way; Verbinski throws everything but the kitchen sink at his heroes. No sci-fi trope is off-limits, even the last-minute suggestion that this reality might not be what it seems. Good Luck, Have Fun wants us to question everything, to shake us awake from our own simulation — and on that front, at least, it succeeds. Verbinski has lost none of his passion as a filmmaker, and despite the flaws in his return, it’s good to have him back.
