By John Corrado
A strange man wearing a plastic trench coat bursts into a Los Angeles diner one night, telling all the patrons that he is from the future and the world will end if they don’t follow him. This is the inciting incident for the genre-hopping Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which serves as the big screen return of director Gore Verbinski.
Verbinski proved himself to be a reliable box office draw in the 2000s with the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, harkening back to a time when studio blockbusters still delivered iconic imagery. This was before Verbinski’s next project for Disney, his underrated, unfairly maligned 2013 take on The Lone Ranger, derailed his career.
The 2016 psychological thriller A Cure for Wellness failed to provide much of a critical or commercial reset. Now we have Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, an audacious mix of sci-fi, social satire, action movie and character drama, that finds the filmmaker back in scrappy, imaginative mode. Verbinski is a filmmaker with a unique vision and voice, one prone to delivering wild set-pieces and tons of spectacle (including in his Oscar-winning animated film Rango), which he is able to offer here on a more limited budget.
The “man from the future” who bursts into the diner is played by Oscar-winning actor Sam Rockwell, who commands the screen right from these first moments. Rockwell’s character – with his scraggly hair and beard and eccentric clothing choices – struts about the diner, walking across tables, offering his prophetic warnings to a mix of amusement and terror from patrons trapped inside.
Future man needs to assemble of team of people to help him on his mission of staving off the apocalypse, brought about by artificial intelligence. The proof? Just trust me, bro. There’s a pair of married teachers, Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), single mother Susan (Juno Temple), and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), the lonely young woman in the corner booth. They will join him on a journey set against the backdrop of a grungy Los Angeles.
Verbinski’s film exists to answer the question of what if Edgar Wright directed a mashup of Weapons, Groundhog Day, Everything Everywhere All at Once and Idiocracy? That sounds like it could be the start of a bad ChatGPT prompt in and of itself, but Verbinski’s film is bursting with human creativity, while also being a pointed screed against AI slop. The result is an entirely mad swing for the fences, while also working in more meaningful commentary on our technology-obsessed present and future.
There is a playfulness to the way that the screenplay by Matthew Robinson keeps introducing new wrinkles and story threads, with an obvious Magnolia-inspired narrative structure to it. The writing is chock full of its own idiosyncrasies as the film constantly shifts genres, from dark comedy, to fantasy, and classic chase movie. A more abstract last act foray featuring a mix of beautiful and disturbing imagery reminds us of Verbinski’s early horror movie The Ring.
The film is mainly anchored by Rockwell’s manic performance, in full-on believes-himself-to-be-a-prophet mode. The constant narrative surprises and comic beats (as dark as some may be) keep the film entertaining and fun, but with an emotional weight underpinning it that gets revealed as it goes along. Sure, it’s hard to see this film doing box office business akin to those first few Pirates movies, but it feels good to have unfiltered Verbinski back nonetheless.
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