“Humanity can be saved and this is where the revolution begins!”
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong language, violence and injury detail.
Pirates of the Caribbean and Rango director, Gore Verbinski, returns to cinemas once again with his newest film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die which, outside its title being fantastic life advice to live by, stands as a black comedy set to tackle the thorny issue of tech dependency and the ever-encroaching shadow of AI.
Sam Rockwell stars as The Man From the Future (yes, that’s in the credits), a brash and eccentric time traveller who turns up in an LA diner to warn patrons about the imminent end of the world. This isn’t his first rodeo through the space-time continuum though; more like his 117th, so he knows that the best way to set things straight for humanity is to rally together a group of unlikely everyday heroes for another epic quest.
And another and another, if it comes to that.
Future Man delivers a frantic monologue to the crowd, with Rockwell firing on all cylinders and he finds difficulty convincing them to come along with him on both sides of the screen. It’s very fast-paced dialogue and its keyed in enough to the current conversations on tech and social media to fly (at one point, he invites us to ‘Scroll Twitter, X, Y, Z whatever’ which I liked) but I just couldn’t get a read on him as a protagonist (not really a hero, by any means).
I found the way he was written rather grating, and that set the tone of the rest of the film off on the wrong note. Naturally, given the narrative, we leave the diner quite early on and I knew by that point that I was going to struggle with the film to an extent. The Man doesn’t seem to care about his group of survivors. His blasé attitude is understandable – he’s taken this journey over a hundred times – but this is our first outing.
We need to have a connection with the people involved in this, and The Man felt as though he was pulling us away from any connection with the gang, or with himself, in a way that felt frustrating.
Verbinski knows that we need to form a bond with the group somehow, so he spends a great deal of time – perhaps a third of the runtime, at least – delving into the history of each person in turn, detailing the events that led up to their arrival at the diner. Like a lot of the elements here, it’s a good idea on paper. We’ve all seen so many ensemble films where the group just blend into each other and don’t feel distinct enough, so it’s best to take the time to establish everyone.
But in practice, this leads to a nonlinear story wherein we flip between small snippets of the night of the quest and lengthy detours, diving deep into past events. This leads to a strange, episodic feeling, with four separate stories taking up most of the first and second acts before everything comes back together for the final push, at which point the wind has effectively come out of the sails as far as the momentum of the world-saving quest is concerned.
These episodes are serviceable enough, though they definitely distract from the main plot. One sees two characters facing off against a horde of stroppy teenagers, barricading doors while John Carpenter-inflected synths punctuate each slam, punch or groan, clearly a loving homage to something like Prince of Darkness.
More often than not, though, Verbinski wears his influences a little too proudly and it’s apparent that he hasn’t brought many of his own ideas to the table here. The second story was a near beat-by-beat retread of one of Black Mirror’s best episodes, albeit with more modern commentary. Occasionally, in opening up the sci-fi toy box and dumping everything out, you do come across something that feels meaningful. One actor really sells a scene in which a relationship has been forever changed by the introduction of some flashy new tech – but unlike 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once, which this definitely owes a debt to (I’m not the first critic to make that comparison) it rarely has the style or the strength of its convictions to grab those toys off of the floor and really play with them in an engaging and funny way.
Its final half hour steers the story back on track somewhat, no longer having to follow tangential threads to establish its characters and instead leaning into the absurdity of the premise with kaiju monsters and surreal imagery. Had the film reached that level of fun earlier, I’d have enjoyed it more, but having to wait until the very end of this 134-minute movie for it to hit the notes that it seems to advertise in its trailer, which makes the whole thing look like a blast, is a hard sell.
As a rather mean-spirited feeling black comedy, it doesn’t have enough laughs or creativity in it to sustain that runtime.
I was really surprised to see how long I’d be in the cinema for with this one – this would have benefitted greatly from losing a half-hour somewhere in the middle, but you only have to look at something like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End to realise that Verbinski isn’t above falling into the trap of overextending his films to their detriment, and that’s coming from someone who otherwise likes his swashbuckling trilogy.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in cinemas now.
