In Gore Verbinski’s absurdist AI sci-fi satire Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a strange unnamed man (Sam Rockwell) steps into a Los Angeles diner and declares that he’s from the future. “All of this is going to go horribly wrong,” he says.
Norm’s diner on La Cienega might not seem like the most likely battleground to decide the fate of the world, but that’s exactly what this fellow — bearded, with a wreath of wires around his head and a bomb strapped under a translucent rain coat — contends.
He is there, while customers sip coffee and bite into an omelet, to enlist recruits for the resistance. In the future, he says, people have entirely stopped participating in life. “It all started with morning phone time,” he says. In the enjoyably oddball, forebodingly bleak and ridiculously plausible Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a ragtag group fights a coming AI apocalypse across a handful of nondescript West Hollywood blocks.
It’s been argued that with the onset of AI, storytellers need to get weirder, more imaginative, more human. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once, which likewise married cosmic and mundane, was animated partly in this spirit. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, scripted by Matthew Robinson, isn’t that creative, and it grows more wayward the deeper it goes into its too-lengthy runtime. But there’s a bonkers charm to how Verbinski tackles contemporary anxieties head on.
This is the first film in a decade from Verbinski, the director of Pirates of the Caribbean, Mouse Hunt and one of the better animated features of the century, Rango. But after a few flops (The Lone Ranger, A Cure for Wellness), Verbinski cobbled together a more modest budget for this independent production.
