Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is a movie of big ideas, impressive comedic performances, and an equal amount of home runs as there are misses. It is the long-awaited return from Gore Verbinski, a master of big screen spectacle who constantly feels undervalued, and features an equally impressive leading performance from Sam Rockwell, who continues to delight and surprise.
The movie opens with such a bang that it takes a moment for it to ramp back up to the same energy levels afterwards. It is a quiet night somewhere in Los Angeles, and a deranged man in a raincoat (Rockwell) barges into a diner screaming about the end of the world. He says he's from the future and all of this has happened multiple times before. In fact, as far as attempts go, this one counts in the high digits. He storms through the occupants, pointing out their flaws and doubts and selects those who will eventually come with him on a quest to save the world.
He explains how only a few years from now an AI will take over the world, and we'll mostly let it happen. After all, we kind of already have. It's the kind of talk that teeters in the realm of "old man yells at cloud," until you start to pick up how much it makes sense. Screens are everywhere, data travels to a few chosen companies, and everyone lives in the cloud. It's bound to come crashing down at some point, but nobody is aware just how ridiculous it will be.
So, it's up to Rockwell to put things right. He needs to find the place where the AI is created on this night, and he needs help. Most will probably die, but that's the risk he's willing to take.
Throughout all of this, Rockwell remains on the move. This is him at his jitteriest and most manic. Verbinski amplifies the performance with his trademark blocking and wild cinematography. Watch how Rockwell goes from cheerily wolfing down a sandwich to appearing from beneath a table to mock a nonbeliever within seconds and you get the idea. The result is like a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon. In the span of ten minutes we know everything we need to about what kind of movie this is. If at this point you have any hesitations about things, it's just best to give up. It doesn't get any more coherent.
But that's why we tune in to a Verbinski production. He has the same go-for-broke vision that makes Terry Gilliam so interesting, even when they fail, or perhaps because of it. Both are filmmakers who always swing for the fences, even if it was safer to take an easy stroll to first base.
Such it is with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. There isn't a single easy answer or decision in sight. Instead, the script (written by Love and Monsters scribe Matthew Robinson) feels tailor made for Verbinski's sensibilities in that it barely makes sense. But what it lacks in logic, it makes up for in big laughs and an emotional connectivity that binds even the wildest moments together.
And boy, is it funny. There's an extended sequence involving a gag about cloning new children because the real ones keep dying in school shootings that is so incredibly dark and incisive it left me wheezing. It helps that the game cast, including Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, and Zazie Beetz, are entirely in on the joke but never make light of the material itself. As far as they and Rockwell are concerned, this is life or death, it just happens to be patently absurd.
Does all of it work? Absolutely not. By the end, Verbinski falls for the same excess that plagued Lone Ranger and At World's End. It's the same inability to say no that defines Gilliam. But there's something admirable about it, too. You know that whatever you're seeing is the work of a singular vision. There's no committee in sight. For better and for worse, this is unfiltered insanity right from the source.
It won't work for everyone simply because of how odd it is, and there's a momentary lull in the pacing around the halfway point. But these are minor quibbles that really shouldn't matter for a film as audacious and unique as this. Three weeks since my screening, I still think about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die every single day. It is the kind of poignant and prescient satire that can be extremely broad because its vision is so specific.
If it were a mirror, it would be one of those at a fun house that distorts the image. You can't quite make sense of it, yet it's mesmerizing nonetheless. Look past the exaggeration and it will be our own reflection staring back at us.
