Sam Rockwell’s manic messenger may be humanity’s last, strangest hope in ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.’
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News

Is it possible that we have been getting so many end-of-the-world films because we’ve reached the end of the world? Director Gore Verbinksi of the new release “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” emerged from 1990s-era hit TV commercials and music videos to more or less invent the 21st-century mega-hit with “The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” (2003). He went on to direct two more “Pirates” films for Disney and the Oscar-winning CG-animated Western spoof “Rango” (2011) before helming two expensive duds, including the famously doomed “The Lone Ranger” (2013).

This new dystopian/time-travel mashup, which was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, and is set in Los Angeles is Verbinski’s first effort in almost 10 years, giving its voluminous title an ironic ring.

Sam Rockwell in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.” (Briarcliff)

The action begins with a scene set in an L.A.-iconic Norms diner. In a role credited only as The Man From the Future, Sam Rockwell delivers a tour-de-force, Rockwell-ian performance. The character may not have a name. But we know who he is from his appearance: unwashed-looking, scrawny beard, pig-faced kid’s backpack fished out of a bin, grimy, hooded, clear plastic coat, some sort of tubing, electronics worn as a form of clothing, and a button attached to a wire coming out of his sleeve connected to metal devices around his chest. Among other things, he claims to be a suicide bomber. He also constantly moans crazy shit about being from the future and having a mission he has tried to complete 117 times. Maybe, this time, he’ll succeed. For now, he has two captive audiences

Yes, Verbinski and screenwriter Matthew Robinson (“Love and Monsters”) present the idea that The Man from the Future will look and sound like a homeless person from present-day Los Angeles (people are trying to cancel that description). He seems to know the names of all the diners and the staff. He calls many by name. He chooses a group of them to try to escape from the diner after the police arrive. His plan is to take his chosen few on a journey of only a few blocks, a journey not many will survive, to a house where a young boy is inventing a form of AI that will lead to the end of the world as we know it (not coincidentally, we hear R.E.M. sing their song of the same name).

The plot is a mix of several ideas popularized by the paranoid science-fiction wizard Philip K. Dick, including the “Matrix”-adjacent notion that we might live in an alternate reality, not know it, and maybe even prefer it. At times, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” reminded me of, of course, Harold Ramis’ “Groundhog Day” (1993), but also Terry Gilliam’s “13 Monkeys” (1995), which was itself inspired by Chris Marker’s “La Jetee” (1962). In one of many flashbacks, a diner named Mark (Michael Pena), in his role as a substitute English teacher, tries to introduce his phone-affixed student (shades of “The Life of Chuck”) to Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” “Is it YA?” one of them asks. Another finds a film version online starring Keira Knightley. After the “Natural Born Killers”-evoking scene in the diner, the film divides itself into un-Tolstoy-like short stories about several of the chosen diners. Mark and dining partner Janet (Zazie Beetz), also a teacher, flee from a horde of phone-gazing, zombie-like students in the first. In other backstories, diner Susan (Juno Temple) tries to clone her murdered son, while Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is—argh—allergic to technology and bleeds like Eleven of “Stranger Things” when she is exposed to it, loses her lover to a pair of digital 3D goggles.

Screenwriter Robinson throws a lot against the wall: time travel, cloning, school shootings, phone-addicted children, the decades-old, now-fully-arrived threat of AI, a giant kitty monster vomiting glitter, crazy street people from the future. Some of it sticks, some of it does not.

But Rockwell is both the engine and crazy beating heart of “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” and he finds the dark comedy completely liberating (so do we), including a shout-out to Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” He’s like a darker, funnier Benoit Blanc from those awful “Knives Out” films. As the damaged, “off her meds” Ingrid, whom Rockwell dubs “Princess,” Richardson looks so natural in the princess dresses that you wonder why the actor has never played one. You hear me, Disney?

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’

Rating: R, profanity, violence, gory images, sexual content

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Zazie Beetz

Director: Gore Verbinski

Writer: Matthew Robinson

Running Time: 129 minutes

Where to Watch: In theaters

Grade: B+