REEL | Sam Rockwell Terminates 'Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die'

"I am from the future and all of this goes horribly wrong!"

Briarcliff Entertainment / Constantin Film

After nearly a decade in director's jail, blockbuster filmmaker Gore Verbinski returns with his wacky sci-fi adventure, the bombastic but retro-futuristic Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. Starring Sam Rockwell as an unhoused-looking time-traveller from the future, who arrives suddenly in a Los Angeles diner, trying to prevent a rogue A.I. apocalypse from destroying the world—think Terminator meets Everything Everywhere All at Once.

After his dramatic arrival, Rockwell's unnamed goofball of a madman protagonist (our Kyle Reese) forcibly recruits a seemingly random assortment of strangers and diners, played by Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, and Juno Temple, all with their own baggage, in one desperate last shot to fix his A.I.-ravaged future. While all this is happening, we also witness exaggerated perils from our actual reality where social media addiction, endless integrated advertising, technology dependence, the attention economy, and mass shootings have crippled society's basic everyday functions.

Scripted by screenwriter Matthew Robinson, the gonzo film's clever script wears its influences loudly as an obvious rip-off of The Terminator's durable premise as well as countless other twentieth-century genre film classics, while told in slowed-down flashbacks in between the main action. Meanwhile, Rockwell leads both his reluctant hostages and recruits on a suicide mission to counteract the future's runaway artificial superintelligence programming.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die's confrontational, techno-dystopian paranoia makes for some appropriate, contemporary social commentary about humanity's likely doom in the vein of an episode of Black Mirror. Verbinski's rip-roaring cinematic penchant for madcap slapstick comedic storytelling makes the cautionary fun and sci-fi tropes all the more energetic despite the dire subject matter about our mutually-assured annihilation.


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