Movie Review: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

I have a soft spot for movies that take wild swings by telling chaotic stories full of unpredictable subplots and outrageous set pieces (see Everything Everywhere All at Once, Magnolia, Escape from the 21st Century, et al.). As such, the latest from director Gore Verbinski (The Ring, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) looked appealingly bonkers to me when I saw the trailer. It certainly does deliver on its promise, though something about it didn’t wind up totally working for me. That an obnoxious man in the theater at the same time as me actually took out his phone and made a phone call about 30 minutes in certainly didn’t help. Nor did it when he received one another 30 minutes later. Luckily these highly ironic interruptions were relatively brief, so I don’t think they clouded my judgement too much, but I can’t entirely rule it out.

The movie begins with a terrific sequence in an unassuming diner, which sees a “Man from the Future” (Sam Rockwell) barge in and declare that he needs to assemble a group to try and prevent the impending death of half of humanity and the Matrix-like imprisonment of the other half. He gathers up a skeptical crew consisting of dating high school teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple), tech-allergic Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), pie-lover Marie (Georgia Goodman), and Boy Scout leader Bob (Daniel Barnett). As they attempt to leave the diner while avoiding the hyper-aggressive Police that have now surrounded the building, the mission is laid out: prevent a local 9-year-old (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) from building the world’s first sentient A.I. before software from the future can be installed on it adding some vital safety protocols.

The group doesn’t need to get very far as the young genius lives only a few short blocks away, but increasingly outrageous obstacles lay in their way. As they head out, the movie begins cutting to flashbacks that explain how each character ended up in the diner at that exact moment. These vignettes play like short episodes of Black Mirror and each contain character backstory and details that will pay off later. These are all pretty effective and viciously satirical critiques of modern American society, focusing on screen addiction, school shootings, cloning, and virtual reality, that are compelling enough on their own, though they do break up the momentum of the larger story and aren’t really saying anything new.

The script by Matthew Robinson (Monster Trucks, Love and Monsters) may have taken on more ideas than a film can reasonably handle, though he does pack in enough darkly absurd humor, tense action, and unpredictable developments to keep the viewer entertained. Verbinski and cinematographer James Whitaker stage the chaos with flair, even if Geoff Zanelli’s score occasionally sounds distractingly cheap.

Making an A.I. that purportedly just wants to “make people happy” the villain is a timely and smart touch, even if it appears that we still haven’t quite figured out how to represent the technology as an onscreen character. It may be a massive step up from something like 1992’s The Lawnmower Man in that regard, but the presentation still has an air of cheesiness. The movie doesn’t take itself too seriously however, making the rough edges easy to forgive. The cast seem to be having a blast, with Rockwell in particularly relishing every zany moment, and their enjoyment proves infectious. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die may take a somewhat dim view of humanity and the core message is basically just “technology bad”, but it’s imaginative, energetic, and frequently very funny. Even when it stumbles, it does so with style. ★★★½