Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)
Image From IMDB
Sam Rockwell travels back in time to a diner wearing a bunch of circuit boards and a plastic rain coat shouting at people for using their phones and fucking up the future while looking for recruits to stop A.I before it causes a dystopia. Sign me up.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is not subtle. Gore Verbinski and writer Matthew Robinson clearly believe like myself that we’re going down the wrong path with our over-reliances on technology and they weren’t afraid to shout about it for a couple of hours. The cynical nature of the movie could have become overly preachy and turned into a chore, but honestly, a lot of what they were saying was right, and that cynicism also came with a lot of fun and weirdness, along with a very strong lead performance from the ever dependable Sam Rockwell.
The movie follows The Man From the Future’s (Rockwell) quest to put an end to A.I before it truly gets started. He has to effectively pull the plug in a nearby house in order to stop a nine year old unknowingly beginning the apocalypse. The success of the mission depends on him finding the right combination of the people available to him from the diner to help. He’s failed 117 times before, but maybe tonights the night…
It’s a weird and wonderful movie. Structured unlike anything in modern Hollywood. The movie feels like a throwback to those odd movies you got at the start of the millennium when films could just be weird, rather than developed by an algorithm. The separate stories are all interesting, with Haley Lu Richardson Ingrid story being my favourite. That could have easily been its own indie movie.
For a film about how dangerous technology is, the effects look great. Everyone is game. The story is batshit crazy, but in a fun way. The bounty hunter vibes of the two pig men feel like something the Coen’s would have done. While the film is clearly heavily influenced by giants of the genre, there’s no awkward callbacks. No Terminator or Back to the Future lines jammed in there. It’s fully its own movie.
I loved all the weird action set pieces. The escape from the school in Mark and Janets story. The warehouse chase scene. That insane battle at the end outside the kids house. Juno Temple’s Susan also had a great side story that could have been its own thing.
The movie just had a lot of ideas, and executed them all well. It could have almost been a science fiction analogy about the abuse of technology with The Man From the Future’s story used as a wrap around like an old Tales From the Crypt. Maybe that was the intention, but the wrap around was also a full story.
I really liked this one. I enjoyed it a lot as I watched it, but am enjoying it even more as I write about it. I’ve seen reviews saying it’s a Gore Verbinski shouting at the cloud meme (whether they recognised the irony of using The Cloud I don’t know) and it is definitely a very cynical movie, but there’s too much fun, smarts, and creativity within it to simply dismiss it as ‘old man yelling.’ I think just for it being something different amongst the current Hollywood Superhero and remake slop its worth a watch, but I also think its a good movie that deserves attention on its own merit.
