Review: GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON'T DIE

 by Rob DiCristino

Or: Everything Everywhere for Way Too Long

Sam Rockwell, man. Sam Rockwell! Is there anything that guy can’t do? Have you ever seen a movie that didn’t immediately spring to life when he appeared on screen? Is there a brand of cockeyed weirdo he hasn’t played to perfection? He’s one of those actors’ actors, a true-blue thespian who approaches goofier turns in comedies like Galaxy Quest with just as much intensity and commitment as he does weightier roles in dramas like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. He’s got leading man looks and freak boy energy, and even when he finds himself an accessory in a totally doomed project — it’s now my unfortunate duty to remind you that Argylle exists — he never treats the work with anything but the utmost respect. We love Sam. We love him! In a way, he’s an ideal avatar for Gore Verbinski, the tentpole blockbuster director of yesteryear whose Pirates of the Caribbean movies — like Rockwell — mix polished spectacle with oddball irreverence. In short, Rockwell and Verbinski are two great tastes that should taste great together.

Which brings us to the sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, their first collaboration and Verbinski’s first major project in nearly a decade. The fun begins in a quiet Los Angeles diner, where forty-odd patrons are sipping coffee and playing on their phones. Suddenly, a wild-eyed man in a plastic raincoat strapped with what appear to be explosives (Rockwell) blasts through the front doors. Claiming to be from the future, he launches into a protracted diatribe about humanity’s imminent downfall: Social media has melted our brains, he says. It’s destroyed our shared reality, making us so selfish and myopic that we won’t even be bothered to look up when artificial intelligence takes over. It’s apocalypse-by-apathy, essentially, and he’s been sent back to this time with a flash drive of safety protocols to be installed in the first AI supercomputer, which, wouldn’t you know it, a nine-year-old is building in his bedroom just a few blocks away. If a handful of diner patrons can just help him across LA, they can save humanity before it destroys itself.

Oh, did he mention that he’s been in this diner before? A hundred and seventeen times, to be exact, a hundred and seventeen attempts to find the right combination of people to help him get to his destination before they all get killed or miss the cutoff when the supercomputer goes live. And if he seems a bit on edge, that’s because it’s not going well! Over and over, he’s walked into the diner, made his speech, assembled a team, tried, failed, reset, and tried again. He’s Edge of Tomorrow-ing it. You get it. Anyway, Trial #118’s team consists of teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), single mom Susan (Juno Temple), and kids’ entertainer Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson). Each one of them has a backstory that makes them ideal for the resistance: Mark and Janet were attacked by students zombified by their phones. Susan cloned her son after he was killed in a school shooting. Ingrid is (literally) allergic to technology. Scott, well. Actually, Scott’s just there to be a stick in the mud and get killed off halfway through.

Written by Matthew Robinson (The Invention of Lying), Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die intersperses these backstories during periodic breaks from the main action, each one intended to magnify a particular way in which technology has made humanity ignorant and cynical: Mark’s an idealistic substitute teacher who’s horrified — bless his heart — that students would rather stare at their phones than read Anna Karenina. The technophobic Ingrid thought she found love with crunchy hippie Tim (Tom Taylor), but even he was eventually seduced by the allure of a VR reality game. Susan attends a support group for parents who replaced their murdered children with clones, some of whom are so worn down by the horror of losing the same child in multiple shootings that they’ve started modifying the clones’ personalities “just for fun.” Good Luck mines a great deal of dark humor from this particular chapter, especially when clone salesman Blaise (Dino Fetscher) tells Susan she can save money on her clone if she buys one “with ads.”

Taken individually, each of these chapters would make for a most excellent adventure, especially in the hands of a director with Gore Verbinski’s eye for craft and technical skill. A Dawn of the Dead-esque horror flick where Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz battle teenagers on cell phones? Great! A dystopian hellworld where we’ve so thoroughly normalized mass murder that grieving parents like Susan — Juno Temple plays haunted incredibly well for someone who makes her bones in comedy — search for the souls of their lost children in the cloud? Spectacular. A punk rock princess like Haley Lu Richardson — who, it has to be said, looks more like Florence Pugh by the day — trying to navigate a WiFi allergy in 2026? I’d watch any one of these movies, especially with a hyperactive Sam Rockwell in the mix. Bearded, manic, and straight out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Rockwell is Good Luck’s extra-strength super glue, delivering exactly the commanding performance we’ve come to expect from an actor with his style and sensibility.

But even a superstar like Rockwell can only do so much, and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die eventually collapses under the weight of too many premises and plot convolutions, each one more inscrutable and, frankly, boring than the last. Whereas the Daniels are able to balance absurdity and earnestness in the chaotic Everything Everywhere All at Once — this film’s most obvious influence — by keeping the focus on Michelle Yeoh and her family, Good Luck lacks a comparable central relationship, and Verbinski elects to fill that gap with as much overwrought noise as possible: Man-eating cats the size of Godzilla? Homicidal dolls that would have made Sid from Toy Story cower in fear? A sociopathic child genius (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) seated atop an Iron Throne of ethernet cables? It all gets exhausting after a while, and while there might be a ninety-minute banger buried somewhere inside Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the film as presented is nowhere near rewarding enough to be worth the work audiences are being asked to put into it.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die hits U.S. theaters on Friday, February 13th.