‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ Review

Despite a typically engaging Sam Rockwell performance, and some visual dynamism from director Gore Verbinski, ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ never fulfills the promise of its opening set up, as a ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ by way of Edgar Wright, instead delivering a half-baked sci-fi romp further reduced by half-baked social commentary.

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ opens in a packed diner. Some people are having dinner together, some are having coffee by themselves, some are having a celebratory piece of pie. Almost everybody is on their phone.

Until Sam Rockwell walks in, looking unhinged and dangerous, and yells for everybody’s attention. He claims to be from the future, claims he has been to this very diner over one hundred times before, because in this diner, somewhere, is the correct group of people who will join with him to help save the world from its impending destruction caused by AI. And if he doesn’t get enough volunteers, he has a bomb strapped to his chest that he will not hesitate to detonate, so he can start the process all over again.

This opening is the strongest point in the film, with Sam Rockwell doing his Sam Rockwell-iest to sell this bizarre blend of high stakes sci-fi adventure and zany comedy, setting up what feels like an engaging and unique blend of genre and tone. And yet none of the ensuing adventure lives up to this promising beginning.

As the plot goes on, it becomes less and less interesting. At first, I was growing frustrated with the use of flashbacks to introduce each individual member of this band of unlikely heroes. While these flashbacks serve as darkly comic vignettes on all the ways technology is depriving us of our humanity, they do less to flesh out the characters than to halt any narrative momentum in the central sci-fi adventure.

But each time it returned to the main plot … still not much interesting happened, so I’m left thinking of the flashbacks as a crutch to enhance the runtime without having to come up with clever plot developments and character beats.

To say ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ is on the nose with its social commentary would be underselling just how explicit all of its ideas and themes are, with characters telling you exactly what’s bad and why, again and again. But I don’t necessarily take issue with this bluntness, not if the sci-fi adventure is sufficiently fun. But alas, the adventure itself is bland and uninteresting, devoid of memorable set pieces or creative monster design.

With the adventure failing to divert me sufficiently, I’m left to reflect on the world building and themes, which is not a good place to be in. AI bad. Phones bad. School shootings bad. Okay, and?

Each act of the film offers more inane plotting than the one before it, with the climax being particularly off-putting in forgoing clever twists or engaging action in favor of blunt dialogue retreading the same thematic territory. As Rockwell’s motley crew advances towards completing their mission, the antagonists become more and more bizarre, but not in a very compelling way. It feels like Verbinski wanted to create a surreal, twisted hellscape but lacked the imagination to deliver, so all of the bad guys – the CGI monsters, the anthropomorphized technology – come off less WEIRD than they do juvenile callbacks to more indelible movies, be it ‘Toy Story’ or ‘Ghostbusters’.

While the adventure never pays off in a satisfying way, emotionally or intellectually, ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ has moments when it reaches an enthralling balance of dark comedy and sci-fi action. It is an incredibly difficult tone to sustain – and to be sure the film does not sustain it nearly well enough, more often than not delivering perplexing scenes in which serious subjects are played for laughs while otherwise silly beats become deadly serious – but when it works it works very well.

Ultimately, ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ is a swing and a miss from Gore Verbinski, but its ambition and charismatic cast make the whole caper worth watching anyway.

’Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ Review
Rated R for pervasive language, violence, some grisly images and brief sexual content.
Running Time: 2 hours and 14 minutes

Director Gore Verbinski
Writers Matthew Robinson
Stars Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Juno Temple
Rating R
Running Time 134 Minutes
Genres Action, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-fi