Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die review

GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE: 

GORE VERBINSKI MAN VS AI FILM IS VERY GOOD FUN INDEED! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: **** out of 4

BRIARCLIFF ENTERTAINMENT

A man from the future travels back in time to prevent AI from destroying humanity in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

 

            Sam Rockwell (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Moon, Marvel Cinematic Universe) travels from the future to save humanity from an AI apocalypse in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the new film from director Gore Verbinski (The Ring, Pirates of the Caribbean 1-3, Rango) in his first directing effort since A Cure for Wellness in 2016 (The film was released widely in 2017). I don’t recall ever seeing a trailer for this movie in theaters, but I saw the poster many times and knew it was coming out, and that Verbinski was helming it; that’s about it. 

            But literally right before going to see it, I watched the trailer on YouTube to get a better understanding of what kind of film it is, and it looked wild. It seemed to have a Mitchells VS the Machines meets Terminator vibe, even right down to it being about a person from the future traveling back in time to prevent the machines from taking over, except now with a lot more relevance given how far artificial intelligence has come. 

            So, I gave the film a watch and…yeah, this was a lot of fun, I thoroughly enjoyed Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and found it very funny throughout while also having a very thought-provoking message about humanity’s overreliance on technology. If you ask me, this is what that Y2K movie from a couple years ago should have been like,  a wild, darkly comical movie about machines and technology attacking with something clever to say and characters who aren’t complete douchebags like in that film. 

            The film follows an unnamed man from the future (Rockwell) arriving in a present-day Los Angeles diner to save the world from an artificial intelligence that will destroy humanity and needs volunteers to join him. A group of the diner’s patrons consisting of high school teachers Mark (Michael Peña-End of Watch, Ant-Man 1 and 2, The Martian) and Janet (Zazie Beetz-Atlanta, Deadpool 2, Joker 1 and 2), single mother Susan (Juno Temple-The Dark Knight Rises, Venom: The Last Dance, Roofman), Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry-Greed, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3, The Actor), and a woman with a bizarre literal allergy to technology named Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson-Shake It Up, The Edge of Seventeen, Split) accompany the man on a wild chase throughout the city to find the AI’s source and plug in a security protocol that will contain it thus saving the human race. 

            The film also stars Tom Taylor (The Dark Tower, The Kid Who Would Be King, House of the Dragon) as Tim, Dino Fetscher (Now You See Me 2, Paranoid, Fool Me Once) as Blaise, and Anna Acton (Family Affairs, EastEnders, Topsy and Tim) as Jillian. 

            Overall, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a gleefully dark and hilarious sci-fi comedy with a thought-provoking and serious message at its core. Despite the film itself being very fun and entertaining, it’s actually a cautionary tale about what might happen to our society if we get too wrapped up in our computers and phones, and with AI evolving at an exponential rate, how much is truly enough? 

            However, what’s so brilliant about this movie is that it isn’t about destroying AI, it’s about securing and controlling it to keep the human race safe, which I actually found a lot more fascinating and compelling than what James Cameron’s message(s) in his first two Terminator films…Yeah, I just said that! Nothing against those films, as those are some of the best sci-fi movies around, but it portrays the technology as the bad guy that’s going to destroy all life, whereas this movie is trying to figure out how to exist in a world where artificial intelligence is prevalent. I thought it was more powerful and bolder, especially in today’s times. 

            Despite this, it is still a sci-fi comedy at its heart, and it is quite funny as a film that throws verbal jokes, visual gags, subtle jokes in the background, or just plain weird shit, and the majority of them hit bull’s eye; the theater I was in was cracking up hard. If a movie can somehow look at something as tragic and serious as school shootings with a tongue-in-cheek point of view and pull it off well, it’s clearly doing something, and there actually is a character’s origin story involving the clone of a dead teenager from a school shooting who verbally says an advertisement like it’s a YouTube video. 

            Sam Rockwell himself is extremely funny as the man from the future, though Rockwell steals the show in just about anything he’s in, even very average films like Iron Man 2. He stole the show as early as the first scene, where he’s in the diner, destroying people’s phones and warning them about the AI attack on humanity, but they don’t listen. His dry, sarcastic humor really works for this movie; it was a delight seeing him in this. 

            Other people like Michael Peña and Haley Lu Richardson are also standouts throughout the film, especially the latter, who plays a woman who works as a birthday party princess and has a mysterious condition where she bleeds from her nose every time technology is around her. It adds to the weird nature of the film, and saying more would have to require going into spoilers, but I really liked Lu Richardson’s Ingrid in this and found her entertaining and funny. 

            The movie is also very gory and the action sequences are pretty creative whether it’s Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz blasting teenagers like they’re zombies with blasters that resemble Mars Attacks rayguns (The film even references that) or Rockwell and Temple getting tangled up in computer wires as they find the source of the AI to plug the USB drive into, it was giving me Kaneda from Akira vibes a little. 

            Yeah, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is easily the most entertaining movie released over the weekend and outshines GOAT, Wuthering Heights, and even Crime 101. It’s a wildly original, darkly funny, and thought-provoking film that takes the Man VS AI plot trope to the most absurd extreme, resulting in a consistently fun and wild ride that ranks among Gore Verbinski’s best work. What more can I say but “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die”?