Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ on VOD, a Scattered Mess of Sci-fi and Satire Starring Sam Rockwell
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Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die
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Director Gore Verbinski (Rango, three Pirates of the Caribbeans) returns to the fray after a decade of dormancy, helming satirical sci-fi whatnotter Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video). Sam Rockwell dons his wacky cap to headline a cast including Michael Pena, Zazie Beetz, Juno Temple and Haley Lu Richardson, who come together in a story about time travel and malevolent AI that superficially resembles The Terminator – and, in its scattershot array of ideas, subplots and influences, about a dozen other movies.
The Gist: Hovering ominously over a Los Angeles diner is a billboard advertising a likely gruesome digital product bearing the slogan, “YOUR NEW REALITY.” Unsettling? Maybe, but in that diner – the type that plates up absurd gigantoburgers and terrific terrible coffee – is an assortment of humans who may be a ripe market for a new reality, since they barely look up from their relentless phonescrolling to notice the raving lunatic who just barged through the door. He has no name, although the credits call him The Man from the Future (Rockwell). Garbed in a see-thru plastic raincoat and a series of tubes and wires and blinky lights connected to a button which he threatens to press and blow the place up if the wifi zombies don’t perk up and listen. He claims to have looped through this timeline 117 times – he even namedrops Groundhog Day to give everyone in the diner and the audience at home a reference point – in search of the right combination of people and events that’ll allow him to eliminate the evil AI entity that apocalypticized the world, killing half its population and enslaving the other half, himself excluded, of course.
From the looks of the guy, running water and soap also went kaflooey, so he looks like a movie stereotype of a homeless wacko, thus undermining his credibility with these folks who just want to shovel in some fries while empty-headedly flipping through their reels. But he quickly reveals that he knows names and details about some of the patrons that he might not know if he hadn’t time-tripped over them previously. He rustles up some non-volunteers to help him: Couple Mark (Pena) and Janet (Beetz), boy scout troop leader Bob (Daniel Barnett), tough guy Scott (Adim Chaudhry) and mild-mannered lady Marie (Georgia Goodman). Curiously, Susan (Temple) volunteers, as does Ingrid (Richardson), who The Man initially denies because of her “off her meds vibes,” but ultimately lets join, because he needs all the help he can get. They have to get outta there right quick since the cops are coming, and in this reality, the cops just straight-up beat people and shoot people and kill people, which should strike you as a familiar thing known as all-caps SOCIAL COMMENTARY.
As this crew – motley, of course – scampers off on its quest, GLHFDD gets sidetracked with flashback vignettes fleshing out some of its characters: Mark and Janet are high school teachers dealing with classrooms full of doomscrollers acting like zombie pod people who spew curious dialogue about Pepsi and Doritos. Susan is devastated after her teen son Darren (Riccardo Drayton) is killed in the latest ho-hum shrugworthy this-again? school shooting; she soon learns of a cottage industry that’s sprung up, offering clones of school-shooting victims, and the fact that there’s a cheaper ad-supported version explains the Pepsi-and-Doritos thing. And then we learn that Ingrid, who works a miserable gig dressing up like a generic princess for rich little girls’ birthday parties, was crushed when her boyfriend Tim (Tom Taylor) dumped her to go live in a virtual reality, a real knife-twist considering she’s “allergic to wifi,” which finds her suffering nosebleeds whenever she’s in the vicinity of a connected device, and therefore is likely to be a rather convenient plot device. Will this ragtag bunch of misfits save the world? Maybe, but I dunno if everyone will survive, since those played by less-recognizable actors don’t get any flashback vignettes.
Photo: Everett Collection
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? So, so many of them, primarily the that’s-so-random comedy of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the POV shifts of Weapons and the general bazonkersness of Terry Gilliam stuff like Brazil, Time Bandits and 12 Monkeys. Ideas are copped from The Terminator, The Matrix and Groundhog Day, and shots, scenes and/or characters are derivative of Toy Story, Her, Wicked and animated-movie-that-time-forgot Robots. Hey, remember Robots?
Performance Worth Watching: Although Rockwell is zany-fun to watch here, we’ve seen him do variations on this character several times now. That leaves us eyeing the highly talented supporting cast that’s spread thin and not given enough to do, the standout being Temple, who provides the most effective emotional hook, and furthers the recent creative reinvigoration of her career, which includes standout work in Ted Lasso and the fifth season of Fargo.
Sex And Skin: A below-the-mattress shot of squeaky springs.
Photo: Everett Collection
Our Take: Good Luck, Etc. is a little sloppy in the editing, a little sloppy in the writing, a little sloppy in the thematics, a little sloppy in the plotting. And it all adds up to being a lot sloppy, ironic considering its gratingly obvious rebellion against AI “slop” (that eventually turns malevolent, as it always does in alarmist sci-fi). If one is foolish enough to suss out an overarching trend among the films of 2025, it was Movies About Everything, which tended to reflect the overwhelming info-bombardment of 21st-century existence – Weapons, One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme, No Other Choice and The Secret Agent all brilliantly swamped us with everything, everywhere, kinda all at once, and our resultant attempts to stay on our feet was exhilarating in the challenge.
Verbinski’s follow-up to 2016’s similarly ambitiously bloated A Cure for Wellness is the lesser version of this newish brand of thematic-overload cinema. Matthew Robinson’s (The Invention of Lying) screenplay veers wildly from unapologetic hack-and-slash satire (its bleak depiction of teenage/high school reality is viciously funny) to blindsiding idiocy (a deeply annoying giant CGI cat creature that appears out of nowhere to make nobody anywhere laugh, ever) to the underwhelming dollop of sentimentality at its conclusion. Dotted with engaging tangents, the film’s first half is messy but inspired, teasing us with the notion that the characters and their individual stories might be the true focus, instead of save-the-world plot; yet in the latter half, those compelling narrative curlicues straighten out into a typically yawnworthy race against time populated with half-realized characters and coalescing into underwhelming wads of CGI nonsense.
An underrated stylist, Verbinski does a lot with a little visually speaking – the film looks like much more than its reported $20 million budget – but never gets a handle on the tone or thematic focus. The story maintains its satirical aim throughout, but loses its nerve in the second hour as its stronger ideas get swallowed up in the machinations of the plot. Rockwell dials down his trademark supporting-character jocosity to leading-man levels in an attempt to hold GLHFDD together, and while we appreciate the effort – only he could exclaim “No one even noticed that the f—in’ world ended!” with the proper amount of exasperation – there’s only so much one can do when battling for screen space with that stupid, stupid cat creature. Of course, that creature is one of the only original components of this movie, which piecemeals all of its influences together ambitiously, but never becomes its own thing.
Our Call: Good luck? You’re gonna need it. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
