Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die film review: Wacky time-travel fun
Sam Rockwell shines in Gore Verbinski's anarchic action comedy
This furiously entertaining feature is the film we need right now. In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Pirates Of The Caribbean director Gore Verbinski takes to task our all-consuming tech obsession, suggesting that we’re sleepwalking, or rather doomscrolling, our way to extinction. It’s smartly, and very amusingly, scripted by Matthew Robinson, who has form with this kind of material, having co-written the screenplay for adorable apocalypse comedy Love And Monsters.
It all begins when Sam Rockwell’s dishevelled, seemingly deranged time traveller rocks up at a Los Angeles diner, with terrible tidings from the future. He’s there to meddle in the creation of super intelligent AI, which is being developed by a nine-year-old boy (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) – a humanity saving, desperately dangerous mission that has so far failed more than a hundred times. For this, he assembles a ragtag band of extremely reluctant, very confused volunteers, including Juno Temple’s Susan, Haley Lu Richardson’s Ingrid, Michael Peña’s Mark, and Zazie Beetz’s Janet.
The anarchic, soaringly imaginative antics of Everything Everywhere All At Once are an apparent inspiration, while the film also resembles TV’s Black Mirror as it fills in the ensemble’s backstories in portmanteau style, and we see how each of them has their own tortured relationship with tech. Rockwell showboats as the group’s sardonic yet gutsy leader, a role he was born to play, and he’s nicely flanked by the classy supporting cast. Acting as a wakeup call to get off our phones and out there into the world, it’s wacky, wise and wonderfully enjoyable.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in cinemas from Friday 20 February.