As if you weren’t already aware, our world is, in a word, fucked. Yet hope exists, albeit in the form of a scraggly, smelly and likely unhoused man (Sam Rockwell, Iron Man 2) with explosives strapped to his chest.
Barging into at an L.A. diner one night like a crazy person, he declares he’s from the future and seeking volunteers to help him destroy AI before AI destroys humanity. Seven recruits and 10 minutes later, their revolution begins — with the title singsong-shouted at viewers: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die! (For these dire times, that resonates harder than “Live, love, laugh.”)
As the man and his charges embark on their mission, director Gore Verbinski flashes back to Weapons-style chapters depicting the events the lead the most recognizable recruits to the diner. Teachers Michael Peña (Ant-Man) and Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2) flee from students who’ve been algorithm-anesthetized into TikTok zombies. Grieving mother Juno Temple (Venom: The Last Dance) clones her son after he’s killed in a school shooting. And a depressed party rent-a-princess (the ever-winning Haley Lu Richardson, Split) is allergic to cellphones and Wi-Fi.
Like the film overall, these shorter pieces delight at first before running out of steam. This structure makes me believe Good Luck would have worked best as a true anthology, with the Rockwell-led segments doing Cryptkeeper duty as a wraparound. Throughout, but especially in the aforementioned opening scene, Rockwell leverages the fast-talking, smart-ass thing that’s served as his stock in trade for three decades and counting. His manic energy sets the pace for every arm of Verbinski’s epic sci-fi comedy, but attempting to sustain that grows exhausting, much like Y2K — the movie, not the year (although come to think of it …).
Rockwell’s warning to his army that not everyone will make it to the end could hold true for audience members not attuned to its level of quirk. The script by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) is not quite pitch-black satire, but let’s call it close to sunset; among its best ideas is that cloning your kid is hella expensive unless you get “the ads version,” in which your Xeroxed offspring shills a product once a day, “but in his own voice.”
Inevitably, as the chaos continues and the effects overwhelm in what feels like Act 4 or 5, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die collapses under its own bloat. At 134 minutes, how could it not? (Since earning Disney loads and loads of Pirates booty — as in of the Caribbean — Verbinksi’s rarely met a two-hour running time he didn’t shatter, but I’ll go to my grave defending A Cure for Wellness.) There’s simply too much there here, including a CGI creature’s giant penis slinging while gushing a stream of glitter — a climactic image that reinforces the movie’s message: We’re too distracted to realize how royally we’re getting hosed. —Rod Lott
