Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

What’s The Movie? The 2025 movie I forgot to watch, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

What’s It All About, JG? A nameless man from the future (Sam Rockwell) arrives in a Los Angeles diner, ranting about being there to save the world and needing to recruit people from the diner to help him do that. AI destroys the world in the future, and he’s travelled back in time to install some safety protocols in the software before it becomes self-aware to ensure that humanity survives. If that sounds a bit Terminator-y, well, you’re not wrong. Anyway, the man grabs a motley connection of people – including a couple of teachers, a kids-party princess, a lonely woman who just wants pie, among others – and they escape the diner after the cops get called. They’re hunting for the “daddy of the AI”, a 9 year old boy who created it. After overcoming a collection of sometimes-funny, sometimes-surreal, sometimes-violent mishaps, they find the boy’s house, only to discover that the AI is creating itself. It turns out the man from the future is the son of one of the women he took from the diner – Ingrid, the Princess (Haley Lu Richardson). Ingrid’s allergic to technology but forces herself to install the safety protocols. Thinking they’ve succeeded, they go outside to celebrate, only for the man to see they’ve been tricked. He realises the security protocols don’t work, so zaps back to the future with a new plan – infect the world with Ingrid’s tech allergy via rats. He reappears at the diner from the start of the film, and the whole loop begins again.

Why Did You Give It A Go? While it wasn’t exactly a massive buzz when it was released, it was still fairly talked about, and I meant to watch it back in 2025. Then I immediately forgot about its existence until scrolling through some random films to watch with my fella on a Saturday night. Comedy sci-fi time travel shenanigans starring a vastly deranged Sam Rockwell? Count me in!

Is It Any Good? Mostly, if not by any means exclusively. There’s plenty the film gets right, and plenty that could really stand to be tweaked. I mean, that sounds like almost every movie in Gore Verbinski’s back catalogue (except The Lone Ranger, which should be destroyed for all time for the good of humanity), here returning to the director’s chair after a decade. Seeing what difference that time off has made is one of the interesting things about this movie.

Turns out, it’s not all that much. Verbinski is an interesting director who never quite feels like he’s landed a perfect hit, or perhaps more accurately, delivered a perfect example of his kind of aesthetic. The first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which he directed, are certainly financial successes but creatively, he doesn’t quite feel like he’s hit it out of the park yet. So all the benefits of this being a Gore Verbinski film are present and correct, and so are all the inherent flaws.

That means there’s a wild sense of ambition which, while often thrilling moment-to-moment, can sometimes rather get away from him and undermine things. Because while there’s a huge amount to enjoy in the film, there are also moments where things don’t quite land. The tone, for one. While this is billed as a “comedy sci-fi”, that doesn’t quite feel like an accurate descriptor. It’s often funny in places, mostly through incongruities, but the tone varies between sometimes-funny, sometimes-surreal, and sometimes-violent, and the shift can often be jarring. The film can be genuinely funny in places but then you can get Asim Chowdry – here playing over-enthusiastic everyman Scott with a wobbly American accent – killed off by a meat thermometer to the head. This ends up being weirdly upsetting and not at all the same as the much more cartoonish violence the rest of the film leans into. The film isn’t making a point with this, it’s just a tonal inconsistency.

Similarly, the “cat centaur” probably seemed like a great idea on paper but it doesn’t come off on screen at all. It’s very try-hard, like someone’s seen Everything, Everywhere, All At Once and decided they can do that too. The on-screen realisation of it doesn’t work at all, and the oddness of a benign-looking kitty-cat causally chomping people like a dinosaur in Jurassic Park just doesn’t land. “See how mad we can be?” the film practically screams at you, “see how weird and whacky we are?” No, not really.

But there really is a lot to enjoy here. For one, the structure, where we get flashbacks to everyone’s lives prior to their time in the diner, gives us time to grow with and appreciate the characters while they deal with the mass insanity around them. The best of these flashbacks is easily Susan, dealing with the trauma of her son being killed in a school shooting, only to then find out she can have a clone of him to help overcome her grief. It’s extremely Black Mirror (specifically “Be Right Back” and “The Entire History of You”) in its tone, especially the creepy party she attends with other parents who have cloned their dead child or the way that her son, Darren, will occasionally spout advertisements so she gets a discount on the cloning. It’s funny, disquieting, thoughtful, and extremely well done.

The first flashback, too, is very effective, with schoolteachers Janet and Mark (Zazie Beets and Michael Pẽna) finding themselves caught up in a sort of zombie movie with the zombies in question being schoolkids that can’t tear their eyes away from their phones. There’s something rather charming about phones turning teenagers into metaphorical zombies, then having them actually be in what amounts to a zombie movie, which is just a lovely idea, really well done. It’s one of the smartest be-careful-of-technology moments in the film.

Because if there’s one thing the film leaves you in no doubt about, it’s that technology can be destructive. We know this because the film never, ever stops telling us about it. It feels like about 50% of Sam Rockwell’s lines are just him ranting about how terrible AI is. It gets a bit exhausting after a while, however accurate the sentiment, and it’s frustrating because the film lands it “technology can be bad” thesis just fine with the zombie teenagers and the cloning without having to ram it down our throats every second. We get it, AI is bad! Take a breath already!

So once again, the tone varies wildly, between effective analogies that demonstrate why we should be cautious about what we do with tech and then just screaming at us about how bad it all is. And that’s the film in a nutshell – just all over the damn place. Fun, entertaining, and an enjoyable ride to be sure, but just unable to quite focus enough to make it all come together.

How Many of These Have You Watched? Sci-fi time travel movies? More than I’d care to name, really. The obvious points of comparison are unmissable here – The Terminator, Everything Everywhere…. etc – and it’s not like AI-goes-bad isn’t the main thesis of arguably the most important sci-fi film of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey. While Good Luck… isn’t using it’s time travel set-up in a particularly new or original way, it still works for the film though.

The “going back and trying again and again” that the man from the future is undertaking is also pleasingly reminiscent of the rather excellent Star Trek: Voyager episode “Relativity”. On which note, the number 47 recurs frequently in the movie, presumably as a way of clueing us in that something’s up with this reality (the man from the future even comments about something being different this time round). A deep-cut bit of Star Trek ephemera is that the number 47 turns up with unseemly regularity in 20th century Star Trek, which is a bit of an in-joke or easter egg, and I’d love to think the number’s appearance here was a reference to that. It might just be a Trump thing, though.

Would You Recommend It? I would, very much so. Despite the tonal inconsistencies and the sometimes-ranting nature of the AI-is-bad polemic, there’s just too much here to enjoy for it to be anything other than a great ride.

For one, the cast is uniformly excellent. Juno Temple knocks it out of the park as Susan, and her shift from grief-stricken mother, to bewilderment, to investigative and more is handled with considerable aplomb. She makes the character of Susan easy to like and easy to buy into, and you can’t help but be on her side, seeing her get fucked up by the cloning of her son but in ways that are entirely understandable and even sympathetic.

Haley Lu Richardson also deserves considerable praise for Ingrid. When we first meet the character in the diner, the man from the future tells us that she gives off an “off her meds” vibe, which isn’t untrue but as the film goes on and we discover more about her, things turn out to be considerably more interesting than that. Her allergy to technology – being around wifi and 5G literally makes her bleed and shudder – is an interesting wrinkle alongside all the other goings-on and, of course, the revelation that she’s the man from the future’s mother is genuinely impressive. I honestly didn’t see it coming but it provides a nice circularity to that part of the narrative and really adds something to the story without just being a corny, “ta-da!” moment.

In all of this insanity, it’s down to Sam Rockwell to hold it all together with the sheer power of shouting, and he mostly does a terrific job of it. From his first appearance in the diner, where he appears to be a ranting homeless man with a bomb strapped to his chest, right through till his final understanding that he’s been deceived by the AI, he’s at gale force 12. In truth, this does get a little wearing at times, and the odd moment of him dialling it back a bit would have been appreciated to add a little texture or shade to the character. We get a little of it when we get a flash-forward to his story but a bit more would have been appreciated. Still, Rockwell is clearly having an absolute blast playing this absolute loony of a character, and he’s compulsively watchable and easily one of the most entertaining things about the film.

And that ending, where Ingrid overcomes her tech allergy to get pulled into the AI’s reality, is very effective too. The young boy – played by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt – is genuinely unnerving and his speeches carry real threat without the need to rant or rave. Indeed, they’re all the more effective for being calm rather than maximalist, despite how maximalist the rest of the film is. The creepy toys attacking are maybe a bit clichéd but for the most part, there’s real imagination and verve in these sequences, and we could have done with a bit more of that and a bit less of the cat centaur.

So this, too, hasn’t quite turned out to be the perfect Gore Verbinkski movie that we might have hoped for. That’s something that will hopefully arrive one day but in the meantime, we’re left with a fun, enjoyable movie with a very singular point of view. Sam Rockwell is generally terrific, if the film is overstuffed, that’s better than a deficit of ideas, and it’s a pleasingly different film from endless sci-fi IP’s or Marvel movies. The film is too long – it could lose a good 25 minutes and be all the better for it – but at least we get to spend time with all the characters and really grow to care about them.

Well, except Bob. Nobody cares about Bob.

Scores on the Doors? 7.5/10