Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has human flaws, but the spirit of tech rebellion saves the day
Courtesy Briarcliff Entertainment
Perhaps in direct defiance of the technology they’re satirizing, recent movies and shows about artificial intelligence have also been wonderfully bonkers.
The 2023 limited series Mrs. Davis took a story about a world-dominating AI software and turned it into a gonzo odyssey featuring nuns, assassins, ancient religious relics, rodeo riders and chicken wing restaurants.
Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus is arguably not just about AI, but it’s hard not to see the parallels between technology like ChatGPT and a global society where all knowledge is shared but individual human expression is totally lost.
Gore Verbinski’s latest film, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is similarly bananas, though it lacks the deceptively artful subtlety of its predecessors. Verbinski’s imaginative visuals and a central performance by an always-welcome Sam Rockwell are fantastic.
The script, by Love and Monsters and The Invention of Lying screenwriter Matthew Robinson, unfortunately struggles to express a consistent tone. The film introduces some excellent (and some incredibly dark) concepts, but can’t figure out whether to go full Mrs. Davis or full Black Mirror with them. The result is a lesser — but still pretty fun — version of both.
One auspicious night in Los Angeles, an unnamed man who claims to be from the future (Rockwell) shows up at a diner looking for volunteers to join him in a Terminator-style revolution to save the Earth from an impending technological apocalypse. It turns out this guy dressed like a hobo and covered in various wires and leaking tubes has been to this diner many times, each visit trying out a new combination of allies that inevitably fails.
This time, Rockwell’s character snags a pair of public school teachers (Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña), a grieving single mom (Juno Temple), an Uber driver (Asim Chaudhry) and a bedraggled birthday party princess (Haley Lu Richardson). As the group travel across the city toward a destination only their leader knows, we learn more about the individual members of this unlikely party, and how their individual experiences come to play important roles in the fight for the future.
The movie’s group scenes are undeniably their most fun, featuring killers in pig masks, generative AI abominations made real, and other wild turns appropriate to “anything goes” cult movies like John Dies at the End. This is a world where artificial intelligence is even further along in its world domination than it currently is. Teenagers speak solely in parroted memes and slang. School shootings are so common that it’s possible to clone your lost child — even multiple times. The LA of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is somewhere between what we have now and the wasteland Rockwell’s character hails from.
Rockwell’s world-weary snark contrasts cleverly with his allies’ unbelieving goggle-eyes, and the movie is at its best when the group’s personalities bounce off each other. Most of the individual characters, however, feel undercooked (especially Beetz and Peña, who feel like the barest of sketches). More than exploring these figures as people, their vignettes serve to introduce some darkly comic new part of the world they inhabit. The story of Temple’s Susan features some of the movie’s most interesting ideas, but dressed as jokes that feel increasingly in poor taste. Her section of the film causes the most tonal dissonance, seemingly more appropriate to Charlie Brooker than the Buckaroo Banzai absurdity it aims for.
Courtesy Briarcliff Entertainment
The parts that are purely the territory of Verbinski, however — the stark, detailed visuals, especially — are, along with Rockwell’s performance, the real reason to watch Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. As you might imagine from the guy who brought us A Cure for Wellness, Verbinski commits himself to this bloody, bitter, bizarre sandbox with aplomb, seemingly always looking for ways to make a scene feel disquieting, or to get viewers to bark out a laugh, often both at once.
The wild creativity and midnight movie playfulness on display is enough to recommend Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, even if it does feel like an attempt to cash in on the efforts of similar work that tackles these themes more successfully. It is, overall, a good thing that Verbinski swings for the fences and has a canvas to go as big as he wants. If you watch this and find yourself wanting more, there’s a whole world of better-considered films and shows out there for you to explore. Good luck out there. Have fun hunting. And, obviously, don’t die.
