Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

**/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Juno Temple
written by Matthew Robinson
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a mess. After a long hiatus, Verbinski has resurfaced with an artificial-intelligence horror story told through a high-concept time-travel plot so cluttered, so undisciplined, that whatever usefulness it might have as sociology or satire is lost in the noise. It’s good enough that you wish it were better. Terry Gilliam’s films can feel like this. Even his broadly acknowledged masterpieces haven’t aged well because of Gilliam’s twitchiness and the puerility of his distractions. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die lands somewhere between Time Bandits and The Fisher King: technically proficient films plagued by attention-deficit discursions and peppered with occasionally profound interludes of visual poetry. There’s a scene here where an army of screen-zombified teens follows the dictates of a digital god while massing for attack–sort of a Birnam Wood with cellphones glued to its trunks. It’s a tableau as inspired as The Fisher King‘s impromptu waltz in Grand Central Station–yet Verbinski doesn’t know what to do with the image once he’s conjured it. “Yes, this is a good idea. Now what?” Too often, the “now what” for Verbinski is turning up the volume without ramping up the innovation. Why not have these zombies TikTok dance people to death instead of the usual shuffling around and smashing farmhouse windows?

It opens well, though, as an unnamed man (let’s call him “X” (Sam Rockwell)) dressed a little like Bruce Willis’s doomed time traveller from Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, appears in a crowded all-night diner telling a wild-eyed tale of a world-ending AI on the verge of coming online in a matter of hours. He’s the Ancient Mariner, but from a post-apocalyptic future. Curiously, his mission isn’t to kill the child (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) who Dr. Frankenstein-ed this monster, but to upload a flash drive containing a program that will “control” the A.I. from the moment of its birth, echoing how American Democratic “leadership” in the age of fascism seeks a quisling’s solution rather than a courageous, moral one. X has quantum leapt into the diner because the future tells him the team to accomplish his mission should be assembled from its denizens, and so, this time, he picks a young woman dressed like a princess, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), and a sad lady, Susan (Juno Temple), who appears to be talking to someone in her earpiece. So far, so good. The set-up has a sprung energy to it: a Groundhog Day cum Miracle Mile vibe carried by Rockwell’s nervy, energetic spontaneity. But the film has neither the imagination to carry off a good time-loop nor the gutsiness to end the world. I do love a moment where X tells a game old fellow that he won’t take him because the old guy is going to die of natural causes within the next few minutes. I wish the picture were always this dark, this absurd. Allowing Rockwell to strut up and down the aisles of a greasy spoon, destroying cell phones and dropping narrative exposition, well, Rockwell was made for this. Let him do more of it.

The band’s quest across town is interrupted by character flashbacks explaining how certain members got to the diner–including Susan’s tale, which is a little “The Monkey’s Paw” and a lot Dan Simmons’s “The River Styx Flows Upstream” in admirably if unsuccessfully stretching for both deeply ironic cautionary tale and emotionally lacerating domestic melodrama–and action sequences heavily reliant on slapstick and, at the peak of desperation, a literal 10-stories-tall digital cat. (Best not to ask.) It quickly becomes clear that this is a quest movie–a video game where you lead a group from one location to the next before facing off against a final boss that uses its nest of cables as tentacles. Seriously, don’t let me make this sound good. In practice, it’s relentlessly chaotic, and plugging a flash drive into something during the boss fight is lifted directly from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, no? While I’m glad Verbinski is still making movies, between this and his previous A Cure for Wellness, I do wonder whether he might not, like Gilliam, benefit from stricter guardrails around his ambition. I know you’re not supposed to say such things, but my favourite Gilliam as I decline into my dotage is the small-budgeted Tideland, where all of his visual invention is at the service of telling the tale as opposed to indulging in baroque skylarking. The good version of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is Satoshi Kon’s Paprika; I’m starting to think Kon was the only artist who ever really surfed the line between reality and delusion gracefully. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, alas, is just a neat short film trapped in the body of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.