It’s been a decade since we’ve had a Gore Verbinski movie, which is a travesty because he is one of our finest blockbuster movie directors out there. Verbinski is a director with an eye for well-used VFX, which is very rare in Hollywood these days — Davy Jones remains one of the single greatest computer graphics creatures of all time, while his animated movie “Rango” was so good it made ILM choose that project instead of working on “Avatar.”
Verbinski knows how to make even a small story feel huge, whether that’s the balls-to-the-wall slapstick insanity of “Mouse Hunt,” or his remake of “The Ring” — arguably the single best English-language remake of a horror movie ever made. Now, he’s finally back after spending years working on an animated musical for Netflix to no avail, and it is a grand return for the director.
“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” starts out inconspicuously, with a regular evening at a Los Angeles diner where patrons are enjoying their meals, each having a story of their own but otherwise not drawing attention. Then Sam Rockwell arrives as a man dressed up in what can only be described as techno-hobo-core, an outfit clearly made out of whatever was found on the dump of a cyberpunk cosplay store. The man, with his long and stringy hair and shuffling awkwardness, doesn’t waste time in making a scene. He says he’s from the future, and he is looking for volunteers to help him on a mission to destroy a rogue artificial intelligence before it destroys the world. Granted, no one takes him seriously — at first. But he starts addressing the patrons with confident familiarity, saying he says he’s done this over 130 times. Is he nuts? Is the contraption tied around his chest a time machine or a makeshift bomb? Why does he know how much change this random patron has in his pocket?
What follows is a truly bonkers, balls-to-the-wall, hilarious sci-fi adventure that starts out as “Repo Man” and ends up going full “Akira.” It’s bold, it’s got a great cast, it’s one of the timeliest genre movies in years. It is great to have Gore Verbinski back.
It’s the end of the world as we know it in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Though comparisons to “Black Mirror” are to be expected, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” feels more in tune with “The Mitchells Vs. The Machines” in how it infuses heart with absurdist humor and an often cartoonishly bonkers story about our dystopian relationship with technology. Arguably the trickiest and most poignant the movie gets is in its depiction of school shootings. The script from Matthew Robinson (“Love and Monsters”) focuses on not just the tragedy, but the unfortunate way such a tragedy has become common to the point of being rudimentary to the American experience.
It shows that duality first in a flashback explaining how two school teachers (played by Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) ended up in the diner at the start of the story. Through the eyes of Peña’s character we see how weirdly normal both teachers and students treat school shootings, with everyone hunkering down in a safe room and just scrolling through social media, ignoring what’s happening outside — before going on about their day without a single care once the emergency happens. But through the story a character played by Juno Temple, we experience the actual tragedy of losing a child to such senseless violence. And yet, there is still a tongue-in-cheek humor about it all, as other parents treat the shooting as just another extracurricular activity; another PTA meeting they have to attend every few months.
As bleak (and funny) as the movie’s treatment of school shootings is, the ire of “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” is aimed directly at AI and social media. The movie argues repeatedly that social media was the beginning of the end for civilization as we know it, and AI is just its herald of the apocalypse, its one and only horseman.
Toward the end, when the movie starts playing around with the idea of simulations and VR, creating wildly inventive visuals to confuse the audience regarding what is and isn’t real, the movie loses a bit of steam — particularly when it goes full “Akira” in terms of body horror and metaphysical talk. Still, it’s easy to get on the wavelength of “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” and just be along for the ride. Though Verbinski’s smallest movie since “Mouse Hunt,” it still feels as ambitious as the director’s blockbuster work.
/Film Rating: 8 out of 10
“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” premiered at Fantastic Fest. It will open in theaters on January 30, 2026.
