Few Hollywood directors deserve asecond chance more than Gore Verbinski. Aman who had as much creative success as he did in the first decade-plus of the 21st century (kicking off the J‑horror trend with his brilliant remake ofThe Ring; raking in billions with his imaginativePirates of the Caribbeantrilogy; winning an Oscar for his debut animated featureRango) did not deserve to spend nearly adecade unemployed due to acouple of high-profile flops. It’s asign of ahealthy film culture to have afilmmaker like Verbinski doing original work for studios. The medium cannot afford to let such obvious talent wither.
Rather, that’s what seemed to be true for the past nine years. Verbinski withered in director’s jail for nearly adecade. His comeback film should be considered aparole violation.Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is gobsmackingly bad, each new scene more misguided and irritating than the last. The film begins with an unnamed man (Sam Rockwell, bored and exhausted) bursting into aLos Angeles diner, claiming to have traveled back in time from adystopian future. He’s made dozens of trips to this particular diner on this particular night, believing that some combination of its patrons comprise the perfect team to join him on amission to stop the imminent birth of aworld-ending AI. We learn the details in atorturously long monologue that establishes the film’s tone: Annoyingly smarmy, toothlessly farcical, undeservingly smug. The film is well over two hours long and you can count the successful jokes on onehand.
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The film is structured around flashbacks showing how each member of Rockwell’s team came to the diner that night. Each one plays like arejectedBlack Mirrorepisode, full of painfully obvious satirical broadsides at modern technology. The first segment features Michael Peña as aschoolteacher whose students are turned into zombies by their smartphones. How topical!Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die spends most of its punishing 135minute runtime on similarly hacky material – such attempts to capture the zeitgeist regarding tech and social media would have felt dated years ago. In 2026, it’s like watching aperiod piece. Even its depiction of AI as acivilizational threat bears little specific resemblance to the technology we’re dealing withtoday.
One thread involving abusiness that makes clones of school shooting victims (who spew ads at lower price tiers) to comfort grieving parents is cutting and original. Yet even that moderately strong concept gets lost amid atidal wave of exasperating cliches and hideous CGI monstrosities. The film’s brutalizing parade of increasingly zany images feels like an attempt to distract from the total narrative collapse it experiences in its final act –Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die could make aplot-hole nitpicker out of the most committed formalist. This numbing, relentless barrage of meaningless nonsense feels, more than anything else, like aTikTok doom scroll. Nowthat’stopical.
