The guy walks into a diner, wrapped in a clear plastic poncho and covered in wires and red digital countdown clocks. He says the end of the world is nigh, he’s been sent from the future to save humanity from evil AI overlords, only a select group of people in this diner can help, and who’s going to come with him right now?
Such is the setup for the zany time-travel comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a movie that’s at least a half hour too long and works about half the time. That’s pretty typical of director Gore Verbinski, whose biggest hits include the first few Pirates of the Caribbean movies and the 2002 Americanization of The Ring. But this one is closer in tone and spirit to his wacky 1997 debut Mouse Hunt and his animated western Rango.
This is Verbinski’s first feature in a decade, and you get the sense he’s been writing down every idea for a cartoonish visual gag and then stuffed them into this movie. It’s sometimes busting at the seams, alternatively overstimulating and overbearing, and it’s full of nods to other movies about dystopian futures and space-time continuums.
The unnamed time traveler, played by the dependable Sam Rockwell, is a fusion of The Terminator’s Kyle Reese and Robin Williams’ mad prophet in The Fisher King. He claims that this is the 117th time he’s gone through this exact scenario, but it has always failed and he’s had to retreat to the past and start all over again. This time, he gathers a ragtag group of potential heroes that includes characters played by Juno Temple, Michael Peña, Zazie Beats and Haley Lu Richardson.
Each of these people gets an origin story, each one grappling with a bugaboo of 21st-century technology. It feels like watching a season of Black Mirror at double speed. So many movies that have tried to tackle the precarious state of the modern world have had to cover so much ground, and this one is no exception: Matthew Robinson’s screenplay is taking swipes at smartphones, social media, AI, VR, the loneliness epidemic, shrinking attention spans and even the American response to school shootings. It’s that last issue, as horrifying as it is, that lends the movie its most surprising and stinging satirical observation: that a society so numbed to gun violence would merely replace murdered loved ones with lifelike robots, which can even be programmed with advertisements.
For every solid comic jab like that, there are at least two lazy ones. There are stretches of genuinely inspired, liberated filmmaking followed by passages that feel murky and endless. The movie is narratively undisciplined and thematically crude, which is both part of its charm and the root of its problems.
But I’d rather take a movie that’s at least interestingly incoherent and obviously driven by an authorial vision than so much of the palatable, anonymous, right-down-the-middle genre fare we’ve been getting from the big studios. Does that mean that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is merely clearing a perilously low bar? Possibly. But it does clear that bar. Just barely.
Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101,” Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.