Welcome to the AI-pocalypse

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the first movie that Gore Verbinski has directed in a decade, is essentially the film Terry Gilliam would have made about AI if he’d still been making films in the AI era. It’s a phantasmagoric, fish-eye-lensed dark comic fantasy about the singularity that may or may not be approaching. Screenwriter Matthew Robinson seems to have penned the movie as a sweaty, desperate yawp against the computers that are coming for his job, as they’re coming for all of ours.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Written by: Matthew Robinson
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Juno Temple, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz
Running time: 134 mins

The completely engrossing opening scene involves a filthy lunatic, played by Sam Rockwell, busting into an L.A. diner at nighttime, wearing what appears to be a clear poncho and covered with what appears to be miniature bombs. He tells the patrons that he’s from a post-apocalyptic near-future and warns them that their world will end imminently. For reasons that are apparent only at the end of the movie, and even then not really, Rockwell tells them that some combination of customers at the diner are the key to preventing the apocalypse.

From there, Good Luck spirals into several different directions, including three mini-stories within the main narrative that function as de facto Black Mirror episodes within the film, with Robinson’s manic energy substituting for Charlie Brooker’s mordant wit. Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz play high-school teachers who run afoul of cell-phone-addicted zombie teens. Juno Temple is a grieving mother whose son may or may not have died in a school shooting. And Haley Lu Richardson plays a young woman who’s allergic to wifi and accidentally stumbles into at least a partial truth about what a burgeoning AI program is doing to the world. They form the core of the team that Rockwell assembles, and together they set out on an absurdly violent quest to save humanity.

Good Luck is modestly effective and somewhat disturbing, and yet it doesn’t exactly deliver on everything it promises. Though it does share some DNA with Terry Gilliam movies like Brazil and 12 Monkeys, at times it feels a little chintzy and hacky, more like a suggestion of those movies, or a collection of references. The contemporary movie that it most resembles, Alex Scharfman’s Death of A Unicorn, is another snarky sci-fi fantasy satire that bogs down in premise creep. That one pretends to be an excoriation of Big Pharma, while this one is a takedown of Big Tech. But though the premise is inherently creepy, it needs better explanation. Black Mirror episodes don’t skimp on key-world building elements, and they’re a third of the length of this film, or less. It needs to let us know what’s really behind the doom of humanity.

Verbinski has style, and has an eclectic filmography that includes The Ring, Rango, and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies. But he’s not really a director of ideas, and at times Good Luck feels a little nutso for the sake of being nutso. The film’s best segment, the 15-minute mini-movie featuring Temple’s character, is a small masterpiece in restraint, a kind of Stepford Wives meets We Need To Talk About Kevin scenario. It’s an oasis of creepy calm in an otherwise noisy carnival.

In particular, the movie’s final third falters, descending into chaos and the kind of huge “exploding thing” ending that ruins many a superhero film or action movie. For a work that serves as a warning flare about the coming AI apocalypse, it sure does seem to over-depend on AI graphics in order to make its final point. Maybe that’s deliberate, but it takes away from the overall vibe.

Rockwell delivers his standard gonzo magnetism, and Temple is quietly effective in her part. But Richardson is the movie’s true breakout star. She’s recently made her mark as a beleaguered personal assistant in The White Lotus and as a sassy widow-turned-CIA spy in Peacock’s Ponies. But this is her first featured big-screen role. Her charisma shines through, giving off early Florence Pugh vibes. She has the kind of magnetism that AI simply can’t match.