'Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die' Review: Long Live Original Film

This year’s Big Game was overrun with A.I. ads. In tandem, you can’t log onto social media — any social media — without being met by an absolute deluge of “here’s how this planet-destroying product is making my life easier, and no, I couldn’t possibly care about the consequences.” Thankfully, Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is here as a balm to all of that nonsense. 

The Pirates of the Caribbean director has returned after a nearly decade-long hiatus to deliver something both scrappy and wonderfully weird. (If you’re not willing to take my word for it, you can take the fact that no major studio would touch the film as confirmation.) Starring the likes of Sam Rockwell, Zazie Beets, Michal Peña, Juno Temple, and Haley Lu Richardson, this star-studded affair is delightfully original and far more timely than Verbinski and the film’s writer, Matthew Robinson, initially intended.

When the treatment was first written back in 2017, the absurd proliferation of generative A.I. had not yet become a problem. That meant that, by the time Verbinski picked up the script in 2020 and when Rockwell was cast before principal photography started in 2024, the team had to create something nimble and broad enough to avoid being dated that still managed to get their point across.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die manages to maintain that balance admirably. Of course, even if it didn’t, no one would blame the viewer for being distracted by all of the hijinks that unfold in the film’s two-plus hour runtime. 

The goal? Plug in the much-needed regulatory software before the final line of code is injected into the A.I. that will bring about an apocalypse of humanity’s own making. The players? The Man from the Future (Rockwell), a reject princess (Richardson), a grieving mother (Temple), two teachers (Beets and Peña), a scout troupe leader (Daniel Barnett), and an Uber driver (Asim Chaudhry).

Robinson’s script is a delight, and Verbinski’s return triumphant, but make no mistake: this is a film that lives and dies by the performances of its impressive ensemble. The Man from the Future has the particularly daunting task of balancing harsh, impossible stakes with a constant, sardonic kind of humor. The character is immediately tasked with an exposition dump — one that was 11 pages of dialogue in the original script — but Rockwell shoulders the burden with ease. His jaunty line delivery and frantic movements keep the viewers on their toes while the rest of the ensemble, amassed in the cafe, respond as an audience proxy (read: this guy is fricken insane). 

The story structure of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is at once unique and familiar. The way the narrative unfolds is anthology-lite, with flashbacks introducing us to key players’ stories while the present acts as the wraparound story (though with much more weight than you find in your traditional anthological structure). This is Rockwell’s movie, to be sure, but there’s no dismissing Temple and Richardson, whose characters are vital, and performances shoulder the weight of the narrative with ease.

There’s a lack of tidiness to Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die that might vex some viewers, but the lack of a traditionally satisfying ending is a feature, not a bug. The messiness is the point, and the fact that the fight continues is a rallying cry rather than a failure in storytelling. Meanwhile, the zaniness that unfolds along the way may act as an unsubtle metaphor for the weirdness that has made itself prevalent in our day-to-day lives since this technology started to rise.

In a landscape where viewers decry the lack of original filmmaking, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a mainstream team offering a unique, engaging, hamfisted, and often screwball movie that both warns and delights.