Gore Verbinski’s Comeback is Very Impressive

PLOT: A man from the future (Sam Rockwell) arrives in an L.A. diner saying that he’s here to save the world from A.I., recruiting some willing (and unwilling) participants to join him in what may turn out to be humanity’s last stand.

REVIEW: Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die feels like a movie that’s overdue in more ways than one. For one thing, it marks Verbinski’s first movie in nine years, since A Cure for Wellness. Verbinski was always one of the quirkiest blockbuster directors in the business, who—even when waylaid by too many Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and The Lone Ranger—always hinted at some real brilliance behind the camera (I’d wager the first Pirates is his best overall effort). But it’s also overdue in that it tackles one of the more timeless sci-fi tropes: humanity facing an existential threat due to technology, at a time when that reality seems closer at hand than ever.

The Terminator was the standard for this genre in the eighties and early nineties, while The Matrix picked up the torch, reinventing the premise based on how technology evolved. The first two Terminator movies saw robots as a physical menace that would take us over by creating indestructible super soldiers. The Matrix harnessed the internet, taking the battle into an alternate reality where we are all plugged in. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die feels like the next logical step in the evolution of the genre, introducing a world where, as humans, we willingly give ourselves over to technology as it incrementally takes over our lives piece by piece.

Verbinski’s film is wildly ambitious, with the script by Matthew Robinson also allowing it to play as a scathing critique of humankind slowly giving away reality in favor of entertainment and convenience. It feels like the work of a writer/director pair who are deeply concerned with the way the world is going, and just like The Terminator and The Matrix, it works as a cautionary tale while still blasting us with some major entertainment.

While Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die isn’t quite on the level of either of those films, it comes closer than you’d think, with it being Verbinski’s most satisfying film in over twenty years. He’s helped immeasurably by star Sam Rockwell, whose performance perfectly taps into the heightened, sci-fi-comic vibe of the movie. He’s a wild-eyed traveller from the future trying to rally humankind through a group of strangers he meets in a diner, with this being one of hundreds of attempts he’s made. His goal is to plug a USB key with A.I. safeguards into a computer being used to take the technology to the next level (and operated by a nine-year-old boy), but there’s trouble along the way as our heroes run into all kinds of obstacles.

The film follows a unique template, with the first half almost playing out like an anthology as we get the backstories of the folks helping Rockwell. There’s Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz as a couple of teachers being harassed by students who’ve lost their humanity due to phone addiction. Haley Lu Richardson plays a young woman who’s allergic to technology and Wi-Fi (literally), whose Luddite boyfriend suddenly gets into VR. Most controversially, Juno Temple plays a woman whose son is murdered in a school shooting and replaced by a clone.

Some of the stories are better than others, with the school shooting section outrageous but not entirely successful. Yet they all come together beautifully in the movie’s second, more action-driven half, which shifts the focus to Rockwell. Some of Verbinski’s imagery, while done on a budget, is arresting, and he also benefits from a great score by Geoff Zanelli.

It’s fitting that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is going the theatrical route rather than streaming, as it would have been too ironic—and perhaps contrary to the movie’s purpose—to have it make its debut on a streaming service. Instead, it’s getting a rollout courtesy of Briarcliffe Entertainment, and it will rely strongly on word of mouth to make an impact. Back in the eighties and nineties, this would have been labelled a “cult film,” and hopefully, the genre audience that will no doubt love it will come out and support it. It’s a wild swing, but it’s also one of the more invigorating and original pieces of sci-fi I’ve seen in quite a long time. It’s nice to have Verbinski back.

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