"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" Review

 People complain that movies are just sequels, remakes/reboots, and formulaic twaddle, but all too often when something truly unique makes it to theaters, they stay home, it fails, then they complain that Hollyweird only churns out endless rehashes of what makes money. (Gee, ya think?) The latest victim of audience abandonment is Gore Verbinski's (director of the Pirates of the Carribean trilogy) Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die which didn't even gross half its miniscule $20M budget.

Sam Rockwell stars as a nameless man from the future (let's call him Sam) or so he says when he walks into a Los Angeles Norms diner (think Denny's, non-LA readers) looking like a bearded homeless lunatic in a transparent raincoat over a bunch of mechanisms which may be a bomb. He claims he has traveled back in time 117 times trying to prevent the end of the world from a technological threat, only to fail the previous 116 attempts. He is trying to assemble the correct mix of diner customers for his mission and seems to know details about how useful (or mostly not) the diners are to the team.

Threatening to blow up the restaurant when when the cops arrive (as they always do), he gathers a group including Susan (Juno Temple), a grieving mother who seems to have more useful knowledge from an unlikely source; school teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) who are frustrated by their students addiction to their phones and were attacked by them; a young woman, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is allergic to technology and gets nosebleeds from it; and a trio of people who I don't recognize, don't get flashbacks, and thus don't have plot armor. (Spoiler alert!)

As they set off on the quest, Sam explains that they need to get to a house where a nine-year-old prodigy is about to finish an AI that will make Skynet seem like a Speak & Spell unless they get to his computer and insert a flash drive Sam has to install safety protocols to limit the AI's power.

Along the way we get flashbacks for the familiar actors' characters backstories and eventually get Sam's story of how his mother had tried to protect him from the AI Apocalypse but his youthful curiosity had tragic results. The party also has to avoid phone zombies, weird mercenaries hunting them, and deal with a monster that I won't describe lest it spoil the bonkers moment it arrives.

The screenplay by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) has a lot of interesting ideas about our addiction to technology to the detriment of humanity. It's a world where kids doomscroll so quickly through social media slop that they're not even watching what is already abbreviated content. They're just tapping for the next dopamine hit after a second. It's a world where teachers are so blasé about school shootings that it's a nuisance more than a danger. And the way the aftermath of shootings is dealt with isn't far removed from actual proposals to keep deceased people active on social media. (Don't worry, the movie doesn't soapbox on the subject demanding mass disarmament.)

The ending is a tad anti-climatic as the revelation of what's behind all this and the results of the party's quest aren't as satisfying as it could've been, but that's also somewhat the point: Not everything should be perfectly tailored to satisfy your every desire.

Rockwell's performance is solid, balancing the notes he's got to hit, and Richardson reminded me of the snarky tart 1990s Janeane Garofalo before her daddy issues drove her mad and she just wanted to scream about Republicans. Peña and Beetz are hampered by thinner roles and when did Temple become old enough for mom roles?

While Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die doesn't quite stick its landing it definitely provides a wild ride with some deep thoughts to go with the crazy, prompting more contemplation about our overly-wired and increasingly AI slopified world. It's ironic that a movie intended to warn against becoming hermits connected jacked into the Matrix failed because people prefer to stay home to consume content and it's on their TVs and phones they may finally see this.

Score: 8/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.