Few filmmakers affected young movie watchers in the early 2000s quite like Gore Verbinski. Whether it be the nightmares stoked by just images from his American retelling of The Ring, or the sense of adventure ignited by the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, it's hard to find someone my age who hasn't in some way been impacted by his work. It's been nearly a decade since his last film, A Cure for Wellness, but now Verbinski is back with a sci-fi action adventure comedy, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.
Narratively the film feels at times like Black Mirror, delivering the main plot of Rockwell and his band of misfits trying to stop the AI takeover, but also cutting to a handful of vignettes featuring some of the cast in what essentially amount to dystopian short stories. At times these do take away from the main story at hand, but there are little pieces in each that are crucial to the main storyline. My biggest issue with these vignettes is that not all of the team get them, making the pacing feel a bit off and some key characters underdeveloped. Perhaps most fascinating with the story though, is that these Black Mirror-esque side plots are the least weird parts of the movie.
Written by Matthew Robinson, the film follows Sam Rockwell as an unnamed man from the future who takes a diner hostage, searching for recruits to help him save the world. He claims to be on his 117th different attempt with the patrons, trying to find the perfect combination of misfits to aid him in stopping a powerful artificial intelligence from destroying life as we know it. I'll leave it at that, as this is a wild ride of a movie that I think is best to go into without too much knowledge of what occurs.
Narratively the film feels at times like Black Mirror, delivering the main plot of Rockwell and his band of misfits trying to stop the AI takeover, but also cutting to a handful of vignettes featuring some of the cast in what essentially amount to dystopian short stories. At times these do take away from the main story at hand, but there are little pieces in each that are crucial to the main storyline. My biggest issue with these vignettes is that not all of the team get them, making the pacing feel a bit off and some key characters underdeveloped. Perhaps most fascinating with the story though, is that these Black Mirror-esque side plots are the least weird parts of the movie.
This is a capital 'W' weird time, plopping us into a seemingly straightforward anti-AI sci-fi adventure only to have some truly bizarre moments occur. As someone who enjoys a strange time at the movies, I was all for it, but I can see some being put off by just how out there this one gets. One area the weirdness is allowed to shine is in the costume design, one of the highlights of the film for me. I was also pretty impressed by the visual effects on display, they aren't in nearly as grand a scale as what we see in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies but are still very well done.
Aside from the sci-fi wackiness, the clear highlight here is the cast. Rockwell is terrific, especially in the opening scene where he is forced to literally command the room. He's a ton of fun and has some great moments of unhinged rambling that I loved. Haley Lu Richardson is another standout as a young woman allergic to cell phones and wifi, and Juno Temple is fantastic as a grieving mother. Michael Pena and Zazie Beetz are also strong additions to the cast, though they don't get quite as much time to shine.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die has a lot to say about our reliance on technology, as well as a bit about the normalization of school shooting, and while I don't think it winds up being overly thought provoking I do think the overall anti-AI sentiment is a positive. I wish the vignettes were either more or less prevalent to help the film flow better, and some points do drag on a bit, but overall I had a lot of fun with this. 3.5/5
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