On a nondescript night in Los Angeles, in the near future, 40 or so odd people gather, each with their own reasons, to grab a bite to eat at a local haunt.  While dining, a man (Sam Rockwell), dressed in a clear plastic poncho with wires crisscrossing his entire body and claiming to be from the future, enters the restaurant and asks for volunteers on a mission to save the world.  From the corner, Susan (Juno Temple) agrees, but seeing no other volunteers, the man begins to assemble the team himself: Mark (Michael Peña), Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), Janet (Zazie Beetz), Scott (Asim Chaudhry), Marie (Georgia Goodman), and Bob (Daniel Barnett).  First, they must escape the diner, now surrounded by police, and then it is off to save the world from destruction. 

Gore Verbinski returns to the director’s seat after a nearly decade-long hiatus with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a 134-minute action comedy penned by Matthew Robinson.  The film debuted at the 2025 edition of Fantastic Fest ahead of its theatrical release in February the following year, courtesy of Briarcliff, which took the film fairly wide on over 1,600 screens. 

The film opens with a routine enough place setting montage of a diner that could be in just about any number of thousands of stories, but James Whitaker’s lens hones just enough edge to the image that we know not all is what it seems. Soon enough, A Man From the Future bursts through the door, and while we in the audience are bolted to attention, the diners could hardly be less phased by this recent annoyance upsetting their meal.  It is a long sequence, not technically a monologue, but nevertheless resting entirely on Rockwell’s shoulders.  The actor – scruffy, disheveled, and dressed like a homeless man from the space age – is saddled with an incredible amount of exposition, and given his dress, demeanor, and design, we never quite know how reliable of a narrator he is.  It is a smart move on Robinson’s part to carefully build that bond between the man and the characters in step with the man and us in the audience so that our trust and understanding of the plot at hand waxes and wanes with the natural flow of the narrative.  Through careful calibration, he never reveals too much about the plot before he is ready, but he is always doling out information so that we never feel like the film is lost despite its hefty runtime. 

His writing does instill a flash of fear, though, once we break from the action of escaping the diner to reset the story a few days prior and follow specifically Janet and Mark, teachers at a high school, with the latter being brought on as a substitute teacher as the regular professor is out on a sabbatical.  Mark is aghast that his students have their faces in their phones the entire day, a fact that the rest of the teachers in the lounge simply shrug off – all in a day’s work.  It is the weakest of the multitude of chapters and deviations this film will eventually veer off into exploring simply because it is when Robinson is at his most pontificating at the keys. Seen through the elder eyes of Pena’s Mark, this chapter mostly seems like it is punching down at the younger generations without any thought or concern about their own struggles or the world that they are inheriting, nor does the film ever express any emotion beyond contempt towards any bit of technology. While Good Luck does take the righteous stand against the insane proliferation of technology into all aspects of our lives, its flaw is that it never actually makes a strong case that this is a world worth saving.   

Perhaps this is because Robinson thought to lean in to this would be akin to heresy against his own eventual thesis, but to present a film about technology while remaining so technologically atheistic is a wild swing that falls apart quickly under the slightest of scrutiny.  In Dune, highlighted more in the novels than on film, for example, technology is outlawed because it has turned against humans.  Here, the threat is AI, but instead of stripping away everything from our lives, technology is clearly still present somewhere in this not-so-distant future; so much so that a technophobe like the man from the future dresses himself head to toe in wires, lights, and various gizmos.  We can pretend, through the presence of wires, that he is working somehow in analog –  a reading that can be teased out in support, given the primitive when compared to the preset tech that landed a man on the moon, why could it not also support time travel? – but the film does not materially support this, given The Man’s total damnation of the use of anything with even the notion of needing a battery charge by anyone; himself, of course, excluded.  While Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is certainly a film of the moment with theories about the intersection of society and politics, the class and rights warfare of “rules for thee, but not for me” is certainly not on its mind which undermines its own thesis as the rapid growth of technology and the billionaire class have been in lock step with each other since the beginning.   

This is, of course, to say nothing of how Robinson weaves in the prevalence of school shootings into his narrative, and while he is rightfully mad at how this keeps happening and the almost laissez-faire nature of it all, he boils it down to a simple plot mechanic that makes for a rather obtuse breakaway chapter involving Susan and her son, Darren (Riccardo Drayton). 

But I digress.  Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die ends up treading water – almost purposefully, though – in these middle chapters despite the ticking time bomb element introduced in the threat from a boy (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), alone in his room, on his computer, less than sixty minutes from launching the most powerful AI model that will grow in sentience and destroy the world unless the man installs a program into the model giving it limitations on its power.  This ragtag team takes a while to get to the boy, but Verbinski does recover from his meandering second act and makes sure that the destination is well worth the effort.  While the plot again does seem to drag even at the height of the showdown to save humanity, editor Craig Wood does assemble the individual beats and moments in such a way that they do come together to wrap everything up nicely while also balancing the film’s humor and morals.  One of the smartest things about this film is how it deploys some of the larger visual effects elements in this later half as the machine grows in both power and influence.  It looks shoddy, almost bad, because the creatures that are sent to protect the boy are generated from the AI model; a winking barb at the various models that have cropped up to endlessly regurgitate their own cute, meme-able slop, in no small part, to help funnel more engagement on social media apps, thereby feeding us more ads and lining the ever growing pockets of Zuckerburg, Musk, and the cacophony of their ilk. 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a film packed with ideas that is unfortunately held back a little bit by the sheer time it takes to make a film, especially one as effects and location heavy as this one, while also having its message feel a little too broadly agitated by the general embrace of technology by the younger generation than a more nuanced approach from someone trying to raise these same arguments but being closer in age to the demographic which the film is interrogating would have.  Beyond that, Robinson and Verbinski are almost too mad, pointing their damning finger – rightly – at the consistent presence of mass shootings to the point that tragedies have become just a part of life, but getting distracted by those pesky cell phones and finally, the “big bad” of the film: AI.  It is frustrating because nothing they are trying to convey with this film is necessarily wrong, but their argument teeters all too often into the overexaggerated shrug of someone who goes out of their way to be mad at progress, and instead of thinking through critically to find a solution, expects the world to reorient itself back around their own worldview.  To be clear, this is not in defense of consumer-grade, generative and corporate AI, but this film came to market a little too late to be as profound as it wants to be.  It reads more like a limp reactionary piece instead of a calibrated attack at the dangers of an untested technology being unleashed to the benefit of the tech oligarchs. Again, this is not in defense of the tech oligarchs, but through the very process of filmmaking, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die lands on screens right as we are in the midst of the exact epidemic it is warning against, if not already past the point of no return.  Thankfully, though Robinson injects enough humor in his script that it does not devolve into a long-winded airing of grievances, and there is enough novelty to keep us engaged and entertained, even if it already feels dated coming out of the gate.