Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Director: Gore Verbinski
Writer: Matthew Robinson
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Tom Taylor
Seen on: 20.3.2026

Plot:
A man (Sam Rockwell) comes into a diner and shouts about being from the future and about the end of the world that he wants to prevent. And he knows that some combination of the people in the diner are the key to success. He has been here before, and if it doesn’t work, he will be back again. This time, he gathers Susan (Juno Temple), Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), Mark (Michael Peña), Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and hopes for the best.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a wild ride of a movie with many ideas that feel completely drug-fueled. Some of it makes sense, other things don’t, but it is very rarely boring. And a movie that rails against AI should be enjoyed in any case.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die tries many things. It offers quite a few perspectives on the evils that come with a unregulated, unsupervised, inhuman use of AI. Some, like the teenagers as cellphone zombies feel a little oversimplifying and old. But others – like trying to bring the dead back to life, or choosing the virtual reality over the actual one – get real emotional weight and feel like a new version of this kind of dystopic vision.

But while the film has dark elements, it always counterbalances them with the most ridiculous ideas and an outrageous sense of humor. It seems doubtful that those ideas could have come to be without the help of drugs, but maybe I am just not creative enough.

The episodic storytelling and the mood swings do make the film feel a little disjointed at times, and maybe overly long. And sometimes you really start to wonder how the things that happen could be possible even within that universe. It might be that the film pulls a double-cross and what we’re seeing is not the fight against AI but an AI simulation of that fight, pushing it into post-modern territory that is quite interesting to explore. (If it is a simulation: whose is it?)

The cast is great, though I have to say that it left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth how the characters of color were mostly sidelined by the story. Scott is the only one who doesn’t get a backstory, and Mark and Janet share theirs (and Janet barely features in it). But they all had their moments, and Rockwell brings just the right unhinged energy to lead us through. In short, I’d say that Verbinski’s creative break did him good.

Summarizing: very entertaining.