Universal Studios
Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is like watching a man find the joy in directing films again, even if I didn’t always love the results.
After years spent sublimating his style into slick theme park spectacle, Verbinski chooses this moment in his career to get back to the basics of the craft: this film is paced, shot, and framed with real care and passion.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is broad satire, sometimes a little too broad for its own good, but it’s an excellent exercise in visual storytelling.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die opens with a shabby, bomb-covered “Man from the Future” (Sam Rockwell) busting into a Los Angeles diner claiming to be on his 117th attempt to prevent a global apocalypse.
He takes the patrons hostage and recruits a specific team: Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), high school teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), and grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple) for a mission to prevent the creation of an AI terminal that will end human civilization.
As the group battles phone-addicted teenagers who act like a zombie horde and lethal masked hunters, they get the sinking feeling they’ve done this before…
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has a lot of fun in elevating middle-brow worries about smart phones, social media, and artificial intelligence into dystopian satire and even cosmic horror. As these concerns are rooted in the real, it gets some wonderful specific dark moments of humor from roasting brand-obsessed Zoomers, emotionally checked out adults, school shootings, and consumer culture. It’s aided by some really great, committed, performances from Sam Rockwell, Michael Pena, and Juno Temple among others.
So you have a really good director and really good cast, what could go wrong?
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die actually reminds me, on the conceptual level, a great deal of Joel Schumacher’s 1993 film Falling Down. Both films have our protagonists locked in what seems like a straightforward journey that leads them episodically through a collection of social irritations. Now the trends being poked at are different, just as you’d expect from films made over 30 years apart, but what the films have in common is that the observations made don’t have any substantive underlying perspective. AI overreach is bad, yes, just as drive-by shooting were and are bad but unless you’re willing to say something about the society that created these conditions you’re just griping.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die recognizes the dangers in people becoming products but it wouldn’t want to possibly offend anyone by arguing say, from a social conservative perspective that there’s something sacred about human life that we’ve lost sight of, or from a left wing perspective that such devaluation is the inevitable consequence of society’s pursuit of profit to satiate human desire at all costs.
The consequence of this is that it’s a fine light entertainment, genuinely thrilling and funny in many places, but it’s pretentious in the real sense of that word: it wants to be seen engaging with broad social issues that it lacks the will or courage to actually grasp in total.
Extras are disappointingly slight with just a five minute featurette.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is, in the final analysis, a really good movie. It could have been great if it was willing to challenge its audience on a thematic level with a script as good as the cast and crew deserved.
Recommended.
