There is a thin line between making something genuinely weird and trying too hard at it. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die straddles that line very closely. For the most part, it stays just on the side of truly weird, but every now and again it tries just a little too much. While watching it this weekend, I was reminded of another film I just watched – The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension – now that’s a film made by some truly strange people. This film was written by Matthew Robinson and directed by Gore Verbinski, a guy who might be weird in real life but who has far too many mainstream instincts as a director to truly let his freak flag fly.
Buy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t DieIn a perfectly average diner, we see perfectly average people all sitting around staring at their phones. Nobody talks. Nobody pays any attention to anyone around them. Certainly not the waitress, utterly on the ball with coffee refills, and definitely not the man with a big scruffy beard, a beaten-up old hat, a clear plastic raincoat, and a suit full of tubes and odd-looking gadgets rambling on about the end of the world.
At least not until he opens that raincoat, claims he has a bomb, and starts rubbing his fingers around something that looks a lot like a button that might explode said bomb. Then they look up from their phones.
He says he’s from the future (and he’s played by a wonderfully off-kilter Sam Rockwell), that he needs some volunteers to help him save the world. This is his 117th attempt to do so, but he’s just sure that some combination of these patrons will allow him to accomplish his mission.
It takes some cajoling, but soon enough seven people (who just happen to be played by the most famous actors in the room) join his mission. On paper, the mission isn’t actually that hard. They need to leave the diner, walk down a few blocks, and then enter a house. There they will find a 9-year-old boy who is about to create an AI that essentially destroys the world as they know it. The AI’s virtual world will lead most of the world’s population to abandon their real lives in order to live in a simulation. This will lead to mass starvation and death. The man from the future (and that’s what the credits call him; he has no on screen name) isn’t even there to completely stop the AI but to put in some barriers, some safety protocols.
But while that mission sounds easy, there are complications. As the man was talking, someone called the police, and they have surrounded the diner. They also have no problem using deadly force. Later, they will be attacked by a horde of teenagers staring at their phones and a giant centaur with the body of a horse, the head of a cat, and a neck full of tiny cats that spit glitter. It is that last thing that feels like someone desperately trying to be weird rather than someone genuinely being strange.
Periodically, the action will stop, and we’ll get a flashback from one of the characters. Mark (Michael Peña) is a substitute teacher struggling to get his students to put down their phones and pay attention. The other teachers, including his friend, Janet (Zazie Beetz), tell him it’s a lost cause. They’ve given up actually trying to teach these kids, but just try to survive each day as it comes.
Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) gets a bloody nose anytime she’s around technology. She falls in love with a man who hates tech but is gifted a VR headset and loses himself completely in it. Like a drug, he becomes addicted to it and feels like the reality it creates is greater than real life.
In the most wonderfully satirical flashback, Susan (Juno Temple) loses her son to a school shooting. But these have become so commonplace that hardly anyone bothers to comfort her. She meets a few other moms who also lost their kids in the same shooting but they act like it is more of an inconvenience than a true tragedy. The reason is that a company has learned how to clone their dead kids (and the government pays for it since it was a school shooting). But the personalities come out all wrong.
It’s a stacked cast (and I haven’t even mentioned Asiv Chadhry, who is part of the team but doesn’t get a backstory), and they are all very good. Sam Rockwell was born to play this kind of unhinged goofball. Most of the film is very fun. It does periodically cross over the line into trying too hard to be weird but then it will swing back into adorably strange.
It isn’t subtle with its messaging. It whacks us over the head with a metaphorical hammer over the dangers of AI and staring at our phones too much. One wonders what the people who watch movies while looking at their phones will make of this. Probably nothing; they’ll be too busy posting selfies with their screen to actually notice the message painted in big, bold letters.
It is nice to see Verbinski back having fun in a big, weird playground. The film is a lot of fun to watch, even if it doesn’t quite cross over the line into true greatness.
Universal Studios presents Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die in a 4K UHD/Blu-ray/Digital Code package. The only bonus feature is a making of featurette.
