Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Review: Shock Comedy Makes Fun of AI, Sci-Fi Tropes, and School Shootings

Every generation comes to believe the world will end in their lifetime. But in Gore Verbinski’s long-awaited return to the screen, the sometimes bleak and often mercurial filmmaker behind The Ring and Mouse Hunt muses we are the first era who’s pretty chill about the whole thing. Just don’t block our screens when you pull that curtain down.

Working from such fertile ground for dark satire and “kids these days” screeds about youths glued to their devices, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is dizzily ambitious in its gallows-tinged nihilism about the technology ruling and ruining our lives, even as its humor comes across as more mean than mirthful. From the outset, mileage will vary, but at least through it all is one brilliant bit of subversion: the film’s screenplay by Matthew Robinson dares to ask what if we did another sci-fi riff on Groundhog Day, but told it from the perspective of the other folks in the diner who stare slack-jawed at Bill Murray?

Sam Rockwell’s slouching, wild-eyed antihero calls this out in the first scene when he walks into the restaurant strapped to what looks like a bomb beneath his transparent raincoat. He is here, he claims, for the 117th time. Trapped in a Kyle Reese-style time loop, he’s come to prevent an AI apocalypse by building a pseudo D&D campaign of sad sack losers from some configuration of these disbelieving customers. They will march together into the dark before a new AI supercomputer out there becomes sentient. Rockwell’s last 116 attempts apparently ended with everyone else’s death, and the Future Man being forced to hit reset and travel back in time. Or so he claims.

Our true point-of-view characters, then, whom he recruits, cajoles, or otherwise threatens into this mission are thus the real heroes since they, like the audience, must determine if this madman is also a messiah, and what his mission has to do with odd things they’ve noted in their day-to-day lives. 

There’s Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), new teachers at the high school overwhelmed by the indifference of their students to literature, lessons, and even survival, as indicated by a school shooting before lunch that’s treated like just another case of the Mondays. Worse still, is the experiences of Susan (Juno Temple), a single mother who lost a son in that morning’s shooting and whose grief is treated as a mild inconvenience by the authorities who come just short of saying, “There’s an app for that.” And then, most mysteriously, remains Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), the diner dressed like a Disney princess and who sports a similarly unlikely allergy toward wi-fi technology. Smartphones give her literal nosebleeds. Curiously this genuine, anti-tech twentysomething is the one person Rockwell doesn’t want on his save-the-world team, but tonight he’s feeling goofy. So is his movie when it takes time to breathe between its bouts of seething.

The thing to most appreciate about Good Luck, Have Fun is that it is as bold as it is clever. Verbinski has seemingly been in director’s jail since A Cure for Wellness, which might explain why he produced this latest effort himself. The newfound independence has also made him defiant. This is a movie that plays as flippantly with taboos as Leslie Nielsen does while taking the piss out of a 1970s Airport flick. Only the comedy fodder here is the increasingly common occurrence of school shootings and the overwhelming ennui of a distracted, zombified society.

It is tonally daring, but if we are being honest, checkered in its success as a comedy or entertainment. While Verbinski is still best known for the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, including what is arguably the best live-action bit of fairy dust released under the Disney banner in this century, the filmmaker’s tastes usually run more toward the cruel and sardonic. Mouse Hunt is Looney Tunes if Elmer Fudd was a self-pitying divorcée trapped on Sisyphus’ hill; The Ring was a curse movie that delighted in a mother corrupted into complicity by a murderous video tape. Thus Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die becomes an anti-tech parable which takes pleasure in the sight of a passive-aggressive Verizon-like salesman pushing the basic “comes with ads” model of a dead kid’s replacement clone on the boy’s grieving mother.

A basic description of this scenario, which Temple’s lost parent finds herself in during a flashback, reveals how slippery Robinson’s screenplay can be. And the way that Verbinski’s misanthropic mise en scène drifts between happy-go-lucky and a malice-choked cackle during these gags can be uncomfortably funny. At times. Often though, one finds themselves in a comedy where only the movie appears to be having a good time.

The audience can be won over quite a bit, especially when Rockwell’s natural rhythm and physicality is given space to guide the ensemble through impossible escape scenes and tightly edited visual gags. For one of the pioneers of blockbuster CGI spectacles in the 2000s, Verbinski also reveals a welcome nostalgia for the old ways, and Rockwell as a disheveled, past his sell-by date John Connor makes for a good anchor of fight scenes that only partake in CGI during moments that seem designed to mock a grim future of AI Slop and Sora overlords.

Some things never change, however, and like every Verbinski movie since 2007, Good Luck’s conclusion overstays its welcome while piling one unwanted twist onto another as the film insists upon, repeats, and exhausts its timey-wimey harangue.

There is something undeniably admirable about such a big swing of a movie that brazenly defies the committee or algorithm influences of modern American cinema. Despite its third act dalliances with CG, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die creates the illusion of feeling analogue, hand-sewn, and even too-cool for its bullet-ridden school. It’s part retro throwback to the kind of original, populist entertainment that Verbinski came up in during the ‘90s, and part pained wheeze about Zoomers needing to brick Siri for good.

There is an audience out there for this cult classic of tomorrow, but having watched it today, I cannot say that includes really me.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die opens on Friday, Feb. 13.