‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ Movie Review: Fun, Weird-Ass Original Movie Swings For the Future
Photo from Briarcliff Entertainment
From Jeremy Kibler
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is one fun, weird-ass movie. It’s big-swing filmmaking bursting at the seams with an expansive ensemble, ambitious ideas, and a lot of visual imagination. Gore Verbinski—an inventive and eclectic director behind The Ring, the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Rango—makes a welcome return after 2017’s A Cure for Wellness, an understandably too-strange but sorely unnoticed genre-defying gem. His nine-years-later follow-up is just as oddball with an absurdist sensibility, and if you’ve been waiting, this anything-goes sci-fi action-thriller amalgam has man-eating cats the size of any Wayne Szalinski target in Honey, I Blew Up the Kid as a bonus.
With the appearance of a homeless crackpot, an endearingly wacky Sam Rockwell plays a man who walks into a Los Angeles diner one night and claims to be from the future. This is his 117th time, or so he says, and he needs to recruit a group of patrons. Of these misfits, the strangers include married couple Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), both teachers at a school where their faculty is mysteriously diminishing “on sabbatical’ and the students go from phone-obsessed to sinister; Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a party princess with an unusual allergy to phones and Wi-Fi (yes, you read it right); and Susan (Juno Temple), a single mother who loses her teenage son in a school shooting and has the option of cloning him. It’s the end of the world as they know it, and no one feels fine.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die sometimes feels like a few different Black Mirror episodes strung together, but it comes into its own with a gonzo energy. The script by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) is an original one, and while some of the characters are just expendable, many of them have their backstories filled in over the course of the story. Of the large cast led by the reliably offbeat Sam Rockwell, an equally touching Haley Lu Richardson and Juno Temple are the major standouts, bringing so much humanity and vulnerability to this otherwise colorful world.
It will always be preferable when a film tries to do too many things instead a film that doesn’t much try at all. With something urgent and doom-laden on its mind, this bleakly amusing indictment of an AI takeover eventually twists itself into a pretzel. Exhausting? Yes, but it’s always entertaining when Verbinski and his game maintain the kinetic anarchy. Overstuffed and uneven as it might be, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die mostly uses its excess as features rather than bugs. It isn’t going to be for everyone—even studios passed on it—but that’s what makes it such a weirdo.
Rating: 3.5/5
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is now in theaters.
