Director Gore Verbinski is back after a long hiatus with a signature wacky and wild adventure frustratingly titled Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. The title is a play on what amounts to a throwaway line in the film based on a saying in a virtual world that we never actually see. Thankfully, the film is not as clunky as the title and is ultimately a rollicking good time.
The opening scene introduces us to Sam Rockwell as a time traveler who informs the 40-or-so patrons of Norm’s diner that he is from an apocalyptic future. This is his 117th time doing this same rigamarole, he says, coming back again and again, hoping to test different combinations of diners with the belief that one day he will put together the right group to prevent the upcoming AI apocalypse.
Rockwell is gold in this opening scene, which really starts the movie off on a strong foot. He ends up gathering a group that includes characters played by Juno Temple, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Haley Lu Richardson, and a few others.
The film then begins to give us flashbacks to where these characters were before they met Rockwell’s character in the diner. The first scene has Peña and Beetz as a couple of teachers facing romantic friction as Peña attempts to deal with high school teens during a stint as a substitute teacher. A later flashback reveals why Richardson is wearing a princess costume when Rockwell meets her in the diner.
But far and away the most memorable of these flashbacks follows Juno Temple as the mother of a school shooting victim in a short story that could be a Black Mirror episode. It includes an absolutely wild conversation that really goes wild with the darkly comedic sci-fi concept at hand.
In between these flashbacks, we keep returning to our group as they attempt to exit the diner and make their way to their objective, which I won’t reveal here. These parts of the movie have their charms as well, but are noticeably weaker compared to the opening monologue and the fun flashback stories.
The structure with the flashbacks does make things a bit clunky overall, and the last third of the adventure won’t be for everybody, but it worked well enough for me not to take away from the overall fun of the movie. The message of the film is obviously that AI and tech are destroying the world, and it’s pretty heavy-handed about that message while simultaneously never taking itself too seriously.
It’s a really solid movie for such an early release and bodes well for the future of movies in 2026—even if it serves as a greater warning for the future of society at large.
