"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" Review: A Message From A Plausible Future?
There’s nothing like being in the hands of a director that has a vision for the story they want to tell. Director Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is one of those films. This one had me from the beginning with a closeup of a bottle of Cholula, because it told me further smart choices would be made from this director! (Cholula should be everyone’s hot sauce of choice.) In all seriousness, the opening imagery is a visual spectacle that should be studied in regard to taking a scene we’ve seen a million times and making it interesting. Admittedly, it goes off the tracks in Act III, but it’s refreshing to see a film that swings for the fences!
In a world where people are addicted to their phones, will anyone speak out against it? Hmmm, it sounds like our present day and writer Matthew Robinson obviously has something to get off his chest with his messaging of how we currently live with tech in the story that ensues. In the film, The Man From The Future (Sam Rockwell) bursts into a crowded LA diner to preach a message about the dangers of our technological addiction. The Man’s goal is to find the right combination of people in the diner who will come with him to stop humanity’s impending apocalyptic future. It’s a future in which AI has it out for humanity. Yes, it sounds like The Matrix meets The Terminator but this takes a more eccentric, fantastical approach to its storytelling.
As the rag tag group of patrons, made up of Susan (Juno Temple), Ingrid (Hayley Lu Richardson), Mark (Michael Peña), Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Scott (Asim Chaudhry), are assembled for the over one hundredth time, it becomes clear that The Man seems to know a lot about each patron; this sparks their curiosity to follow him on the journey. Once the film gets going, we get the backstory of each patron. The stories interweave into a clear picture of the motivations for why this just might be the group that saves the world. Will they?
The strength in this film lies in the script. We’ve all probably had a moment where we come out of a doom scroll, had an instance when we look around a restaurant at other tables with people looking down at their phone instead of at each other, or found it strange that what we just said out loud is now an ad presented in our feed. Robinson takes these moments and throws a mirror up to say “this is where we are headed”. It’s a picture of the disconnected, cold-hearted society that we could easily become. It’s a world where a school shooting is an everyday run of the mill thing, classrooms are full of students where phones are stuck to their hands and it gets darker from there. It’s a film that, as a film critic, it forces you to stop taking notes and go for the ride.
Let me be clear, this film gets bonkers. Sam Rockwell does a lot of the heavy lifting in landing on a protagonist that we can follow through his delivery and nuanced performance. The ensemble cast does their part as well, but this feels like vignettes of “Black Mirror” turned into a dark comedy movie over the course of its running time. Robinson’s message is loud, reminiscent of Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You, but doesn’t land as sharply. Verbinski and cinematographer James Whitaker paint a picture of a pretty world that doesn’t realize how ugly it is with the camera and light. That’s what resonates and translates. Society never gets to a bad place overnight. It’s the slow burn into apathy that gets us there. If you’re a fan of quirky, adventure, sci-fi films with a message, this might be worth seeing in theaters this weekend.
Rating: B-
