Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die review: This movie just seriously bummed me out

Sam Rockwell playing an eccentric time traveller from the future on a righteous crusade to save us all from AI slop and the nonsense of social media is a strong premise for a film.

In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Oscar winner Rockwell seems primed for success by Pirates of the Caribbean filmmaker Gore Verbinski’s first movie in almost a decade, penned by author, director and Ricky Gervais collaborator Matthew Robinson (The Invention of Lying).

But the film seems to let its ambitions to take down the evils of technology in one fell cinematic swoop slightly get the better of it, resulting in a sprawling story with uneven characters and a lack of focus.

It’s also borrowed pretty heavily from the likes of Groundhog Day and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

I did, however, have fun with some of the stand-out story arcs and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’s wilder swings – even if its doom-and-gloom (yet entirely unfanciful) predictions for the future bummed me out.

The film kicks off with Rockwell making a dramatic entrance to a diner as his unnamed man from the future, warning all the patrons of what will happen – as he can attest to, not that we get much detail – if they continue to allow social media to ‘rob people of their dignity’.

Ranting and raving that ‘humanity can be saved’ from the dangers of AI if people join his mission right now, while scraggily bearded and rigged up with a homemade bomb vest, is an entertaining premise that Rockwell makes the most of.

As he explains, this is his 117th time delivering this rousing call to arms in the hopes of finding the right combination of people to help him save humanity. Here, Rockwell is able to unleash his charisma as a performer: he shows off his prior knowledge of the patrons – their names, the fact one couple is on a first date, and he even kisses one woman.

He’s compelling as always, but it’s the type of role Rockwell could do in his sleep – and he’s has had better material to work with before.

With a lot of wrangling – there aren’t many volunteers – his future man ends up with a motley crew of recruits, including married teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), grieving mum Susan (Juno Temple), Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry, struggling to sound – I think – American) and Haley Lu Richardson’s Ingrid, a professional party princess who’s allergic to Wi-Fi and electronic devices.

From here the film flits between vignettes for the people on the team, sharing their experience with tech and how it’s ruined their lives, and the mission they’ve been yanked in for.

Some are much stronger than others, with Temple’s Susan (a heartbreakingly nuanced performance) given a scenario that could have been an entire movie by itself as she’s invited to make a clone of her son with AI after he’s killed in a school mass shooting.

Not only is she able to customise his temperament for the 2.0 version but she even meets parents at an event who are several clones in on their daughter as she keeps being gunned down. In a twisted way of managing their trauma, they’ve decided to make the latest version of their child ‘freakishly tall’ and ‘a little bit racist’ while she’s here.

Richardson’s segment is the other with most promise as Ingrid battles her natural sensitivity while her partner (Tom Taylor) sinks under the insidious influence of a VR headset.

Meanwhile their mission with Rockwell’s character continues, encompassing baddies in pig masks, an army of phone-addicted youths and a creepy mound of wires. And this is before I even mention the giant cat-horse creature with a long neck that pees and spews glitter, which is sinister enough before you even discover its cannibalistic tendencies.

At two and a quarter hours Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is too long and becomes convoluted as it struggles with which direction to take.

The muddled final act also prevents it sticking the landing – with further developments harking back too closely to Terminator 2 again.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in cinemas from today.

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