“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” Takes Viewers On An Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Adventure

If there’s one truth that can be taken from the last few years of cinema, it’s that we’re in dire need of more weird movies. We’ve had big movies, and great movies, and movies that will be watched for decades to come, but it’s simply been too long since we’ve had something truly “out there.”

Enter Gore Verbinski, the mastermind behind the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. Until this latest entry, he had spent the best part of a decade away from the camera. “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” is, in a word, madness. Take the mile-a-minute gonzo energy of the most frenetic “Pirates” movie, multiply it by 100, blend in a dozen other inspirations, and you’ve got something that doesn’t really feel like anything else we’ve ever seen before.

It’s a little bit “Black Mirror,” a little bit “Groundhog Day,” a little bit “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and yet simultaneously entirely its own thing. While individual moments largely come across as relatively small-scale (a huge chunk of the first act is contained entirely within a single diner), it’s a movie with seemingly infinite scope - Sam Rockwell is incredible as the endlessly exhausted but determined man from the future, playing just unhinged enough to make his rambling seem mildly terrifying, but with an earnestness that puts you firmly on his side.

It’s a film with a lot to say about the state of the world right now. Set in Los Angeles on the cusp of the artificial intelligence (AI) singularity, the point at which it takes over everything and effectively dooms mankind, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” oddly stands out as one of the most optimistic films about the oncoming apocalypse. Rockwell’s character understands what needs to be done to save the world, but unlike the protagonists in “The Terminator” or the more recent “Mission: Impossible” movies, he isn’t wholly intent on destroying it but rather harnessing it for something better. At that point, there’s no evil mastermind at work, just an artificial intelligence so captivating that it distracts the planet into killing itself.

It’s a unique take on the genre that feels very aligned with our own modern understanding of the AI threat, now that we’re already living with it. It’s unlikely that ChatGPT is going to morph into SkyNet and wipe us out by taking control of our defense networks, but making it so we never interact with anyone or anything else ever again? That’s just close enough to real that it feels like a real threat.

The movie is interspersed with a fair few flashbacks that could easily stand as solo “Black Mirror” episodes, but all interlink into one final twist-laden, satisfying showdown. It is, however, a long journey to that ending. This movie may take some of the best elements from Verbinski’s work on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, namely its spectacular supporting cast and fantastic action sequences, but it also adopts a number of its less desirable traits, such as an overly bloated runtime and the sense that it could have easily been half an hour shorter. The movie is a ton of fun and deserves to be seen on the big screen, but those final moments, as cathartic as they may feel, come after two of the longest hours experienced in a theater.

But it’s a rip-roaring time nonetheless, and a sure sign that, assuming he doesn’t disappear for 10 years again, director Gore Verbinski has still got it in him to make something grand. The whole cast is great, with special shoutouts to Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, and Asim Chaudhry of “Taskmaster,” and if there’s any movie this month that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen you can find, it’s this one.