AI Armageddon with a wink
OB Bureau
After a long silence since A Cure for Wellness, director Gore Verbinski is back and he’s not playing it safe. His new film, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, takes Hollywood’s favourite modern anxiety, artificial intelligence, and spins it into a cheeky, chaotic action-comedy about the possible end of the world.
And yes, the timing couldn’t be sharper. In an era when AI is increasingly embedded in filmmaking itself, this movie feels like a warning shot fired from inside the industry. The madness begins in a packed Los Angeles diner, where a perfectly cast Sam Rockwell storms in wrapped in a transparent plastic poncho crisscrossed with wires, a ticking device strapped to his wrist.
He rants that the apocalypse is imminent. He needs volunteers, now. Most dismiss him as another street-corner prophet of doom. But this man from the future knows intimate details about the diner’s patrons. He claims he has done this before. Over and over again. This is his 117th attempt. When things go wrong, and they always do, he hits reset and starts the night again.
It’s a time-loop twist on the anti-Terminator, and it’s wild. Writer Matthew Robinson widens the frame with a series of backstories. Schoolteachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janey (Zazie Beetz) are fighting to keep humanity alive in classrooms increasingly swallowed by screens.
Susan (Juno Temple), a grieving single mother, has lost her son in a school shooting and is offered a disturbing technological route to reunite with him. Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who suffers from a tech allergy reminiscent of Better Call Saul, has watched her boyfriend disappear into virtual worlds. There’s also Scott (Asim Chaudhry), an irate Uber driver with his own grievances.
Verbinski stages it with manic energy, scanning the diner crowd glued to TikTok and Instagram, hammering home the film’s central dread: humanity has become too distracted to notice its own collapse. The result is part Black Mirror, part Looney Tunes apocalypse.
The film’s structure, however, is as restless as its time-travelling hero. Just when momentum builds, the narrative rewinds for another backstory. The episodic approach gives thematic depth but disrupts pace. The Magnolia-like sprawl makes it overlong, particularly in a final act that squanders some of the goodwill built earlier.
Yet Rockwell anchors the chaos. He’s funny, frenzied and oddly persuasive, devouring diner leftovers and dunking phones in water pitchers while delivering a message soaked in generational cynicism. Haley Lu Richardson offers strong support, but the film occasionally feels self-congratulatory in its humour and critique.
Where Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die succeeds is in its labyrinthine world-building. What begins as a bizarre diner intrusion escalates into a propulsive race against extinction.