Anyone who’s recently stood in line for a bagel or coffee at the local bakery and seen everyone staring dazedly at their cell phones, seemingly afraid to be alone with their own thoughts for two minutes, will totally relate to “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” the provocative new sci-fi time travel comedy directed by Gore Verbinski and starring the perpetually off-kilter Sam Rockwell.
Here, Verbinski (Rango, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) returns to Hollywood filmmaking form with a harsh biting satire on the corrupting ills of smartphones, AI, VR video games, and the toxic evils of social media.
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It all begins peacefully enough until a disheveled man wearing a DIY apocalyptic survival suit (Rockwell) staggers into a Norm’s coffee shop in Los Angeles on a typical night at precisely 10:10 p.m., declaring himself to be from a nightmarish apocalyptic future. He’s there to recruit a combination of diners to help him save the planet from billions of deaths due to a nefarious AI superintelligence.
At first no one believes this bearded maniac but he’s done this exact mission 117 times so he knows some uncanny details about the folks sitting down to a burger or slice of pie. Once he chooses his seven random people and the police show up to detain or kill what’s obviously a dangerous lunatic, the film evolves into a video game-style quest to reach certain “save points” on the way to try and upload AI security measures to correct the terrifying future. The target is a nine-year-old boy who’s creating an AI supercomputer in his bedroom that will one day destroy life.
“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” showcases an excellent ensemble cast including Michael Peña, Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhrey, Tom Taylor and Riccardo Drayton. But it’s Rockwell’s (“Galaxy Quest,” “Moon”) full-tilt, tour-de-force performance that holds the whole wild experience together and it’s sheer joy to watch him go gonzo into pure undiluted mania.
If you think “Groundhog Day” meets “12 Monkeys” with a dash of “Ready Player One” you’d be getting pretty close to the jumble of genres Verbinski is playing with in his pessimistic social commentary written by Matthew Robinson.
With a weird Terry Gilliam-like tone evoked in the British director’s “The Fisher King” and “Time Bandits,” this cautionary tale on the corrosive effects of society’s fatal attraction and over-reliance on our precious electronic toys should strike a definite nerve with anyone witnessing fellow citizens mindlessly texting while driving a car at high speed with their knees in heavy traffic.
As the narrative progresses, the movie does bounce back and forth to provide backstories for each of the seven companions which are intended to be humorous but often come across as simply sorrowful. After numerous failed attempts and many gruesome deaths, our manic band led by Rockwell’s snarky, disheveled temporal traveler encounter everything from mobs of shambling zombified teenagers, hapless masked assassins, and a mutant kaiju kitty-cat.
It all descends into a zany state of cartoonish parody by the end of its long 127-minute runtime and Gorbinski’s message becomes a bit weary and ham-handed, culminating in a satisfying but bleak finale.
And we swear that there’s a not-so-subtle nod to Sid’s demented sandbox playthings from 1995’s “Toy Story” tossed in for good measure in the flashy hyperactive climax.
But perhaps the most unnerving element of seeing “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” is after the credits rolled and patrons of all ages shuffled back into to the lit hallways and lobby of the multiplex only to immediately grab their phones to return to the destructive artificial reality they just witnessed, thus creating a surreal moment where life truly imitated art lampooning life.
