Channelling Terry Gilliam’s humor and sense of the absurd, director Gore Verbinski gives us a Black Mirror-esque anthology exploring AI, violence in America and our culture’s longing to hide from our problems rather than address them.
GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE (2026)
★★★★ OF ★★★★★ stars
“Everything, Everywhere All At Once” was my favorite film of 2022 – a fun social parable with quirky characters than used the aesthetic of sci-fi to showcase dysfunctional family relationships and our inability to engage beyond ourselves. I have to think that that film spoke on some level to writer Matthew Robinson and Gore Verbinski whose latest film, GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE succeeds at doing something similar – a unique IP sci-fi comedy/drama that asks a lot of heavy questions about America but does so a comedic anthology story that feels like Black Mirror and showcases why we feel the need to use technology to hide from big existential problems in our society.
The film starts at a Norm’s Diner in Los Angeles where a Man from the Future (played with aplomb by Sam Rockwell) needs the help of a rag-tag group of diners to shop the dawn of a super AI whose sentience will destroy the world. It’s so odd how this was complete sci-fi in early 1980’s films like The Terminator yet here a super AI awakening is just an inevitability at this point. We follow several of the characters he drafts on this journey and their backstories are interconnected in estblishing the reality (or unreality of this world). A couple played by Zasie Beats and Michael Pena teach at a high school where a hive mind of teenagers controlled by a phone app hunts down individuals who aren’t connected to the world of their phones. A young mother played by Juno Temple has her son killed in an ever-increasing rise of school shootings. In this world, theyre so common that the government wants to downplay their daily nature – by providing cloned substitutes for students gunned down and to replace them with identical copies, well near-identical copies, copies whose existence is subsidized by occassional prompts to buy products like Pepsi and Doritos. This rag tag group is rounded out by Ingrid (played by Haley Lu Richardson) who is allergic to technology – so her only way to subsidize her existence is to play princesses at children’s birthday party, while her boyfriend becomes addicted to a Meta Quest style headset that promises a better reality than reality.
In many ways, these backstories feel like Black Mirror (Temple’s character’s backstory actually channels 2 different episodes of the show exactly). But its the performances and tone that make them feel unique. Rockwell feels like Bruce Willis’ character in Twelve Monkeys, a man who hasd a vague idea of how to fix things and tries over and over to fix what he thinks is the issue to find he’s been wrong all along and ties it to his destiny. But, this movie – while juggling elements of the familiar is its own things. Verbinski, who hasnt directed anything since THE CURE FOR WELLNESS, is recharged here, delivering a movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat wondering when the next reveal or amazing visual is coming. Props to the cinematography here by James Whitaker, that delivers a great visual landscale along with some gnarly sci-fi VFX creatures here that really need to be seen to be believes including an AI prompted cat that is likely one of the most freaky and unique things I’ll see on screen all year. The Body Snatchers/hive mind/doppelganger horror in this is great and using AI as a villain is something that sometimes just doesn’t work – see Mission Impossible’s entity for example. Here it’s something more akin to Edgar Wright’s The World’s End and thats a great comparison in terms of tone and visuals.
If you’re someone who loves comedy, sci-fi, and original ideas – GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE is right up your alley. Sam Rockwell is a tour de force in himself and Haley Lu Richardson shines in this comedic blast.