Asim Chaudhry, Juno Temple, Michael Peña, Sam Rockwell, Zazie Beetz, and Haley Lu Richardson in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
It’s an ordinary night at an ordinary L.A. diner when suddenly a man (Sam Rockwell) bursts in wearing a formerly see-through raincoat, mismatched shoes, a variety of wires and hoses, and a thick layer of grime over all of it. “This isn’t a robbery!” he yells, not reassuringly. “I’m from the future! And all of this…” he says, gesturing around the restaurant and the world outside, “goes horribly wrong.”
Thus begins Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a blast of an adventure movie, a surreal twist on sci-fi, and a black-as-night comedy as dark as it is funny. Rockwell’s character comes from “a future that’s totally and completely fucked, and,” he tells the confused diners, “it’s all your fault.” He comes from a time where half the world’s population died and the other half lives in what amounts to an AI-powered coma. This is his 117th trip back to the same restaurant on the same night, every time picking a different crew from the very ordinary and quite underqualified restaurant patrons to help him save the world. This time out, his ragtag group includes a substitute teacher (Michael Peña) and his colleague/unrequited crush (Zazie Beetz), a mom mourning the loss of her son (Juno Temple), a cocky Uber driver (Asim Chaudhry), and a “weirdo” in a princess dress (Haley Lu Richardson). With an impossible mission and a countdown timer, they set out to stop the creation of the world-ending artificial intelligence before it’s too late.
The Invention of Lying writer/director Matthew Robinson’s smartly starts with Rockwell’s outburst, then as the team is formed, he lets us catch our collective breath with flashbacks to reveal the characters and let us understand how they ended up in that diner on that fateful night. As the story goes on, the film teeters back and forth between vicious satire of our screen-addicted lives and moments of surprising emotional depth, yet it shoots back and forth without ever letting you feel when it shifts gears.
Gore Verbinski returns to the director’s chair for the first time in a decade to craft this madcap adventure, and man, does he just go for it. He makes fascinating framing choices at every opportunity, slipping in little extra shots that unobtrusively build this world and establish just how insane it really is. There’s not a frame that’s not intriguingly weird in execution—even the one love scene is filmed from the mattress’s point of view. Matching Verbinski at every step is Rockwell’s inimitably manic, never-know-what-he’ll-do-next performance. Combined with the CGI elements that arise as the story departs further and further from our recognizable reality, the film starts to feel like Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean crossed with Everything Everywhere All at Once: a special effects adventure built around an appealingly odd rogue that tells a surprisingly personal story with a sci-fi twist. | Jason Green
