Director Verbinski wants to deliver an incendiary critique of AI and big tech, but ends up forcing audiences to pull out their phones out of sheer restlessness.Briarcliff Entertainment/Supplied
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Written by Matthew Robinson
Starring Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson and Juno Temple
Classification N/A; 134 minutes
Opens in select theatres Feb. 13
It has been an interesting season for blockbuster-level filmmakers finally getting sprung from Director Jail.
A few weeks ago, Sam Raimi returned to the big screen with Send Help, the comedic thriller containing all the gonzo vigour that fans had hoped to experience from the Spider-Man and Evil Dead maestro, after the director’s industry banishment due to the hard flop of 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful. (Sure, Raimi was let back in Hollywood’s back door with 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but he felt more like a Marvel hired hand than an artist channelling his own vision.)
This week, meanwhile, Raimi’s contemporary Gore Verbinski is back in action, with his sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die marking the one-time Pirates of the Caribbean mastermind’s first feature since 2016’s let-down A Cure for Wellness. (That bomb came a few years after the similarly disappointing Lone Ranger reboot). But Verbinski might have wanted to take a cue from Raimi and flare up the “Send Help” signal, given that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is neither lucky nor fun ... although it might make you want to play dead for at least a few minutes.
Rachel McAdams is the world’s gnarliest survivor in Sam Raimi’s Send Help
An ambitious but ultimately sloppy time-travel epic, Good Luck wants to deliver an incendiary critique of artificial intelligence and our reliance on big tech. Yet it ends up being so exhausting and weirdly dull that it will force audiences to pull out their phones out of sheer restlessness.
The digital red flags start flying immediately, with Verbinski opening the film by having Sam Rockwell deliver an unhinged but not especially amusing monologue railing against humanity’s addiction to screens. It doesn’t take long for Rockwell’s nameless character, dressed up like a vagrant in a budget Terry Gilliam film, to announce that he’s from the future, and here to save the world before AI destroys us all.
'Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die' is high concept but low vision, with the story constantly and frustratingly rewinding.Briarcliff Entertainment/Supplied
The plan? To conscript a seemingly random collection of diners at an L.A. restaurant as makeshift soldiers to pull off a Terminator 2-like scheme targeting the young genius who, in our “present” day, is tinkering with tech that will eventually doom us.
The film, which was written by Matthew Robinson, is high concept but low vision, with the story constantly and frustratingly rewinding back to offer background on each of the diner patrons who will, maybe, rewrite humanity’s destiny. This might not have been such a bad decision if those characters were interesting, but aside from a chapter focusing on a mother (Juno Temple) who finds a surreal way of mourning the son she lost in a school shooting, the flashbacks are overlong and flat. And when the story does finally catch up with Rockwell’s hero, the action becomes jumbled and nonsensical.
As the film trudges along, stretching into an overindulgent running time, it becomes increasingly easy to see that we’re getting the Verbinski who gave us ho-hum comedy-dramas The Mexican and The Weather Man, and not the delightfully madcap carnival barker who made Mouse Hunt, the first three Pirates movies and Rango. (Yes, Rango! Watch it tonight, if you’ve never had the chance.)
It would be unfair to say that Good Luck is evidence enough to throw Verbinski back in the slammer. But at the very least, it’s an offence necessitating house arrest.
From left: Asim Chaudhry, Juno Temple, Michael Peña, Sam Rockwell, Zazie Beetz and Haley Lu Richardson in 'Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.'Briarcliff Entertainment/Supplied