One thing I’ve always appreciated about Gore Verbinski is that he’s a director with a tremendous amount of ambition. All of his projects, including his myriad of blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean movies, have this “go big or go home” style that is attractive to audiences and makes studio accountants tremble. Even films such as Rango and A Cure for Wellness are so much bigger, and attempt so much more, than anticipated. The same can be said of Verbinski’s first film in nine years, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a sci-fi thriller in the vein of Terminator and in some ways, The Matrix, but also plays like a comedy that skews to the immense talent of its star, Sam Rockwell.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has a script by Matthew Robinson, a writer whose writing on Dora and the Lost City of Gold and Love & Monsters were funny and subversive. Here, he tackles a familiar sci-fi trope, rogue artificial intelligence, and uses comedy to make some insightful points about the dangers of it today. If you’re as old as me, you’ve seen the concept of AI advance from murderous machines to virtual reality, but the fact is that AI is part of our lives right now and we are feeling the impact. It’s not done in some overtly evil way like in the movies. We have willingly given ourselves to it through our use of smartphones, the way we hand over our privacy data, and so much more.
So in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Rockwell plays a disheveled man from the future who has come to our time to recruit warriors in his fight to stop AI from becoming dominant, because in his time it’s basically destroyed humanity. Landing in a busy L.A. diner and posing as a mad bomber, he picks a group of seemingly ordinary people to join in his mission. The folks he chooses are a ragtag bunch who don’t seem like they could agree on lunch, much less save the world.
Robinson’s screenplay is interesting, in that it reflects our world today but in a heightened fashion. We see this play out in flashbacks that offer backstories to the team. Zazie Beetz and Michael Pena are schoolteachers who come under attack by their own students who have fallen under the spell of smartphones, essentially becoming mindless zombies. Haley Lu Richardson plays an oddball, who Rockwell’s character says has “off her meds energy”. Her boyfriend got hooked on a virtual reality headset that made him forsake the real world. Oh, and she’s quit literally allergic to Wi-Fi, making her a misfit among misfits.
The one story that I think will be polarizing involves Juno Temple’s character; a mom whose son was murdered in a school shooting, so she joins a secret government-sponsored program to have him cloned. This section is wild, with support groups for disaffected parents who have cloned their kids multiple times because they just keep getting shot. It’s an ugly commentary on the violence that is very real, and while it’s meant to be sardonic, the humor just doesn’t quite work.
This unsettled tone is a problem throughout. Rockwell’s performance is over-the-top silly, but also oddly heroic. He’s like a quirky version of Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese from The Terminator. Still, the ideas at the film’s core are important, and characters sometimes die in tragic fashion only to have their deaths not taken very seriously. This becomes a more glaring issue in the action-intensive sections, as the group is pursued by gun-wielding killers in pig masks, and brain-addled teens carrying cell phones.
Silly title aside, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die fits neatly alongside earlier films that have helped expand our understanding of AI, and it’s a lot more fun to watch than the most recent Mission: Impossible. Verbinski is known for working with huge budgets (which he would inevitably balloon), but he shows an ability to make a smaller movie feel like an epic. We’re all probably a little bit sick of movies about AI, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a truly inventive piece of work that isn’t afraid to go to some crazy places to entertain and enlighten. Is it perfect? No, but I’ll take intention over perfection any day.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in theaters now from Briarcliff Entertainment.
