★★½☆☆

Gore Verbinski’s first feature in almost a decade is all the proof you need that a film can have a great message without really being all that great. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is his attempt to make a statement about the dangers of AI and overt reliance on technology but the uninteresting characters and the uncomfortably on the nose writing undermine it at every turn. 

The film opens with a man claiming to be from the future (Sam Rockwell) bursting into an otherwise quiet Los Angeles diner to deliver an anti-technology tirade that is at surface level valid but its delivery makes it eye roll inducing. He takes the patrons hostage until a small group of volunteers willing to accompany him on a mission to save the world assembles. The group includes two high school teachers trying to survive an attack from their phone-addicted zombie students (Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña), a young woman with an odd allergy and no will to live (Haley Lu Richardson), a mother of a recently murdered teen (Juno Temple), and an Uber driver (Asim Chaudhry). None of them, however, care much about the Man From The Future’s mission to stop a nine-year-old boy from building the world’s most advanced AI. Rockwell’s energy is intense and his determination to the cause unwavering but it is not enough to sustain the film’s quest-based premise for two hours when the supporting characters are flat and uninterested in his mission. 

Matthew Robinson’s script has all the potential to be great, rightfully critiquing the contemporary obsession with phones and social media as well as the concerning indifference of the general public towards new technologies. It’s also offbeat and sometimes manages to land its jokes neatly. However, there is a quirkiness to it that feels artificial and grows tiresome as the film goes on. 

Where the script is the strongest is perhaps in the flashback vignettes used to introduce the audience to the supporting characters. They are reminiscent of Black Mirror episodes and are relatively effective in making the audience care, at least to some extent, about these characters. Unfortunately, as much as these vignettes are some of the strongest parts of the film, they also present a weird tonal shift from the rest of the story. In particular, the vignette introducing the audience to Susan, Juno Temple’s character, and tackling the American desensitization to school shootings seems completely out of place compared to the rest of the film. We’ve seen this topic tackled well in last year’s hit Weapons but Verbinski and Robinson fail to make their commentary on it meaningful. The approach within the vignette is deeply inconsistent, parts of it feeling almost disrespectful to the real victims and their families but then swinging into some of the film’s best humour. This seems to be consistent with the rest of the film, though. It’s not all bad, it’s just packaged in a way that never quite makes it land.  

What further makes for an odd viewing experience is James Whitaker’s cinematography. For the most part, it’s lifeless and dull, but then it introduces pops of colour every now and then, seemingly trying to play on the film’s quirks but only really succeeding in highlighting the weird tonal shifts that already exist within the script. 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has a great message that needs to be taken seriously. It’s a film driven by Rockwell’s performance and anchored by Richardson’s while the rest of the cast float around just like their uninteresting characters. From top to bottom, Verbinski’s latest is marked by inconsistencies. Throughout its entire two-hour runtime, it seems to teeter on the verge of something great, one rewrite or rethink away from what could have been an awesome, adventure-filled piece of social commentary. As it stands, though, its inconsistencies and cringe-worthy delivery make Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die difficult to be taken seriously.