Germany/USA. 2025.
Crew
Director – Gore Verbinski, Screenplay – Matthew Robinson, Producers – Denise Chamian, Robert Kulzer, Oly Obst, Erwin Stoff & Gore Verbinski, Photography – James Whitaker, Music – Geoff Zanelli, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jessica Norman, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Charlotta Forssman), Ghost VFX & Ingenuity Studios (Supervisors – Krisztian Csanski & Ahmed Hassan), Special Effects Supervisor – Doug Hardy, Production Design – David Brisbin. Production Company – Constantin Film/Blindwink/3 Arts/North.Five.Six.
Cast
Sam Rockwell (The Man from the Future), Juno Temple (Susan), Haley Lu Richardson (Ingrid), Michael Peña (Mark), Zazie Beetz (Janet), Asim Chaudhry (Scott), Tom Taylor (Tim), Georgia Goodman (Marie), Artie Wilkinson-Hunt (The AI Boy), Riccardo Drayton (Darren), Daniel Barnett (Bob), Dino Fetscher (Blaise at Clone Store), Adam Burton (Dale the Shop Teacher), Elly Condron (Sarah the Math Teacher)
Plot
A bedraggled man who looks as though he is homeless bursts into a diner in Los Angeles and announces that he has a bomb. He also claims that he has come from the future and needs their help saving the world. He needs to select six of the 47 diners present to help him. He has been back 117 times before and tried numerous different combinations of the people there to join him, all ending in failure. He makes his current selection. With all of the exit points blocked as police surround the diner, one of his selectees, the mother Susan, is able to direct them to a hidden basement exit. They make their way across the city where the man intends to take them to a house where a nine-year-old boy is about to activate an A.I. In the future, the A.I. will take over the world and it is the man’s mission to insert some code that will humanise it.
Gore Verbinski is a name that has consistently turned up on this site’s radar. After starting out as a rock musician in the 1980s, Verbinski wound his way into directing music videos and then commercials before making his feature film debut with Mousehunt (1997). This was followed by the romantic comedy The Mexican (2001), the English-language remake of The Ring (2002) and then the huge worldwide hit of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), followed by its first two sequels Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007), the non-genre comedy The Weather Man (2005) and the animated film Rango (2011). In the mid-2010s, Verbinski had the flop of the big screen remake of The Lone Ranger (2013) and his only film following up on that was the medical horror A Cure for Wellness (2016). Verbinski has also produced The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013).
It has been a decade since we have heard from Gore Verbinski where his previous film A Cure for Wellness didn’t do much to set the world alight. Verbinski has always been a director whose material shifts and changes shape – there is never anything you can put a finger on it and identify as personal or characteristic touches. He can switch from big, bloated films like the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and The Lone Ranger to eerily atmospheric horror films like The Ring to really eccentric mainstream fare like Rango. It is hard to know exactly where to slot Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die – it in itself is such a crazy film that is all over the place and (characteristically) like nothing else Verbinski has done before.
The scenes where Sam Rockwell bursts into the diner and takes everybody hostage, while appearing to be in a Timeloop where he is enacting the same scene over and over, has quite a few similarities in its set-up to Kill Me Again (2025), which appeared one month earlier the same year (although both films substantially differ after that opening scene). If you were to look for comparisons you could maybe call Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die a version of The Terminator (1984) where the role of Kyle Reese has been recast with a combination of Bruce Willis’s bedraggled, half-mad time traveller from Twelve Monkeys (1995) and Vincent D’Onofrio’s time traveller from Happy Accidents (2000) where we were kept in a state of ambiguity about whether he was genuine or a lunatic.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a film that is completely mad and all over the place. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed it – but it also feels like a film that goes in completely nutty directions just for the sake of it. At one point, there is a giant-sized cat with the body of a horse and a long extended neck that seems made up of the bodies of I couldn’t quite clearly see what that turns up, devours some of the cellphone zombies and then leaves. Why, what it has to do with anything you have no clue. There are two comically inept masked men hunting the party with a heavy detachment of weaponry where you have no idea what they are doing there either. It is not even clear why Sam Rockwell has to specifically select six people from the diner (as opposed to from anywhere else) as the ones who will save the world.
The film veers all over the place. There is an attention-grabbing opening with Sam Rockwell bursting into the diner, selecting the group who will help him this time and they set out. All good and well and our attention is sufficiently held. Then as the group sets out, the film jumps back into telling several stories from the various characters leading up this. The first of these involving Michael Peña as a substitute teacher who finds that the cellphones his class are spending all their time on are turning them into zombies doesn’t do much – the premise borrows something of the Stephen King novel Cell (2006), later filmed as Cell (2016).
That said, the subsequent two stories improve. The best of these is the story where Juno Temple loses her son in a school shooting and then discovers a cloning service that will restore him to life. This has a considerable satiric element to it from the other mothers who seem cheerfully accustomed to the formalities of a school shooting to the selection process she goes through with the greeter at the cloning service, who tells her that she can have a clone model that comes with ads, to the parents at the meet who talk enthusiastically about having their daughter programmed as a racist Muslim (!) for their own amusement. Also good is the story with Haley Lu Richardson as someone suffering from an allergy to cellphones who meets a boyfriend into the same as she who becomes lost to a virtual reality headset.
These flashback stories take the film off in all sorts of wild tangents (not to mention changes of tone). And certainly, these do all tie back in together in the script’s large, untidy but creative jumble. It is interesting to learn that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was conceived as a tv series and then spun out into a single film. This makes more sense – I kept thinking as I was watching just how much all of this was resembling something like tv’s Black Mirror (2011- ) with each episode that focuses on some darkly, nightmarish development of technology. The script incidentally comes from Matthew Robinson, who co-directed/wrote The Invention of Lying (2009) and wrote the scripts for other films such as Monster Trucks (2016), Dora and the City of Gold (2019), Love and Monsters (2020) and 11817 (2026).
Eventually everything arrives at the meeting with The AI Kid, where the film takes on board current concerns about real-world developments of Artificial Intelligence. Unlike other works coming out, this is something the film is mildly horrified about but more or less regards as inevitable and at least argues that we should try and humanise the A.I. supermind before the singularity arrives. More horrific than that, at least in terms of what Sam Rockwell is repeatedly lecturing the other characters about, the film seems to fear the numbing, anaesthetising effects of a populace that has become completely absorbed in social media to the exclusion of all else. The film arrives at an interesting end where [PLOT SPOILERS] we seem to get a restoration of a happy ending before Sam Rockwell decides that this too is a projection of the evil A.I. and does another reset so that he can make another attempt to try things. Here the film seems to buy into the idea that we are All Living in the Matrix.
Trailer here