Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Review

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a zany time travel comedy from Gore Verbinski, making his first film in 10 years.

In a diner in Los Angeles, a man (Sam Rockwell) enters, claiming he’s from the future and needs volunteers to help him save the world. He leads a gang of six different people to the creator of AI so they can prevent a dark future. On the way, they must avoid multiple threats, from a trigger-happy LAPD, masked vigilantes, and weird AI creatures.

Verbinski is best known for the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, and won an Academy Award for Best Animated Film for his offbeat film Rango. However, he was put into directional purgatory because The Lone Ranger was an infamous box office bomb, and A Cure for Wellness performed so poorly that it was pulled from most theatres after its second weekend. His comeback film was a smaller affair. It was made on a budget of $20 million, although it appeared to have cost a lot more, and focused on comedy. Verbinski has been seen as a marmite director; Mark Kermode has made great hay out of his hatred for the original Pirates trilogy, but there’s no denying his films have personality and flair.

The basic premise of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was a blend of the Terminator films and Edge of Tomorrow, as it centred on a man trapped in a time loop and attempting to prevent an evil AI from taking over the world. Instead of an action film, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was a quirky comedy, like taking the surreal aspects of Twelve Monkeys, another time travel movie. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was using well-worn ideas and was able to put its own spin on them

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was a combination of dark comedy and satire. This was a film that featured a lot of comedic death, and I laughed a bit too hard at a child being punched. A lot of the actors had comedy credentials, especially Rockwell, who was hilarious as the leader of a group. He was a loveable asshole who treated his crew as expendable and was able to come up with a creative and effective putdown.

The satire came from Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’s commentary on AI and society as a whole. There has been an increase in films that have tapped into modern fears about AI. The final two Mission: Impossible movies showed how AI can manipulate reality, whilst AfrAId showed how much control AI has in people’s lives. The villain in the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles short was a robot that stole intellectual property and turned into AI slop. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was an indictment of people’s addiction to their phones, AI, and virtual reality. In the film, it led to a future where people didn’t notice that society collapsed because they were focused on their devices. Even in the film’s present day, it showed that people were addicted to their phones to the point that they were pretty much zombies who ignored the wider world. It was only a slight exaggeration of the world we’re living in. When the film did take on generative AI, it felt like the creative team had taken some hallucinogenic drugs because they came up with some crazy monstrosities.

The film also had some wider jabs at American society. The film showed school shootings being treated with casual indifference. Instead of doing logical things like banning guns, Americans tackle the issue with panic rooms and cloning. The cloning part of the film does tie into the broader themes about AI since there were flaws with the cloning process.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was an energetic and chaotic film in the best way possible. It creatively repurposed existing ideas into something fresh and entertaining. Audiences can have fun and laugh along as we head towards our social collapse.