The future is in cataclysmic peril because we stare at our phones and blather on social media all day in the apocalyptic comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
Humanity has one last shot at salvation—an unnamed time traveler played by Sam Rockwell. He shows up at a Los Angeles diner sometime in the near future, ranting and looking like a homeless man, espousing the dangers of AI and our impending doom.
Future Crazy Guy needs the right combination of patrons from the diner to join him in a final crusade to face a crucial moment in time—just minutes away—when AI takes over, and there’s no turning back.
It turns out he’s actually been to this diner, at this same point in history, more than 115 times, with each prior mission having failed. When he sees proof of the mission unraveling, he presses a bomb-like device and sends himself back to the future. He’s stuck in a vicious circle—and it’s starting to grind on him a bit.
In this visit, he manages to solicit characters played by Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Pena and Zazie Beetz. We see the stories—in flashback—that brought them to the diner that evening for some dinner and perhaps some pie: two school teachers witnessing the behavior of their zombie-like students enslaved by their phones; a grieving mother who has cloned her son after a school shooting; and a depressed young woman who is deathly allergic to Wi-Fi and is dressed in a tattered princess outfit.
Director Gore Verbinski (returning to features after a long hiatus) keeps all of the spiraling strands of Matthew Robinson’s script coherent and entertaining. From these flashbacks, the action always returns to the Rockwell-manned mission, and the troubles they endure as singularity approaches.
Rockwell is in peak form, dressed like something straight out of a Terry Gilliam movie (a little bit of 12 Monkeys, a dash of Brazil) and tapping into his talent for manic, eccentric characterizations. After a series of strong, headier roles like his Oscar-winning turn in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and his take on George W. Bush in Vice, he gets to go off in something a little more unhinged. It’s his funniest work since Seven Psychopaths (2012).
Verbinski, known primarily for his contribution to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, explores his weirder side. (He also made Rango and Mouse Hunt.) To his enormous credit, he’s not trying to make people watching this film feel warm and cozy. The movie is a warning—a comic, sometimes silly, yet very dark warning—about the bad tendencies of you and your neighbors. We need to put the devices down and read more books!
As society starts relying on the likes of ChatGPT for all of the answers to our questions and allows AI to take over the societal heavy lifting, it’s no surprise that a movie like this is now in theaters. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has a lot of fun with its doomsday concept, and it will have you thinking twice before you ask your computer to do a bunch of spreadsheets for you. I mean, yeah, you’ll still have AI do those spreadsheets for you—but you’ll have a twinge of guilt while doing it.
