Movie Review: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Welcome back everyone to our second movie review of the week, this time featuring Gore Verbinski’s newest movie, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
Now, there is a lot I want to say about this movie, so I figure we should just jump straight into summarizing the plot, and of course spoilers are to follow.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die begins in Norms diner in LA, where Sam Rockwell’s character (never named as far as I know), shows up, and begins explaining to the patrons that he is from the future, and he is there to recruit a select group of individuals to stop an AI from being created that night, and that he is looking for the correct combination of people to do this. He also explains that he has been repeating this night 117 times now, and he showcases this by explaining things to the patrons that he wouldn’t have known otherwise, proving to some that he is from the future, while others think he’s a crazy guy with a bomb. Regardless, he uses this to recruit Mark (Michael Pena), Janet (Zazie Beetz), Susan (Juno Temple), Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), Bob (Daniel Barnett), Marie (Georgia Goodman), and Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and from there, the movie splits into chapters explaining their stories. First off, we follow Mark and Janet who are a couple that teach at a local high school, where teachers are seemingly dropping like flies to go on “Sabbatical”, while the students are out of control, not listening to teachers, and constantly on their phones. This all comes to a head when Mark touches a student’s phone, and a mysterious triangle pops up, and seemingly begins to tell the students of the entire school to attack the teachers, ending with Mark and Janet seemingly escaping as the sole remaining teachers, and with them both now in possession of a ray gun like device that the science teacher made, which jams phones temporarily. Next, we follow Susan, who is the mother of a son who just died in a school shooting, and is given a card to a mysterious business, which she finds out offers to clone the victims of school shootings, while also allowing parents to select their new clone children’s hobbies, interests, and personalities. Ingrid does this, and finds her sons clone to be odd as it’s personality is off, and is not as she puts it, “special” like her son Darren was, and also because the clone spouts off ads. Susan and Darren then attend a support group for other parents who also had kids that were killed in a school shooting and have had them cloned, and while there, she meets a man who says the clones are off, but a rival company offers a service where the personality is closer to your child, but it is merely a voice, not a body. Susan then purchases this, and while the disembodied voice does seem personality wise closer to her son, it commands her to go to the diner, and tells her she needs to go with “the man from the future”. Our next chapter follows Ingrid, where we learn she has an allergy to Wifi and technology which causes her nose to bleed, leading to her working as a princess for kids' birthday parties. While at a party, she meets a pizza delivery driver who is anti-technology, and the two fall in love, and move into together. However, about six months later a package shows up for her boyfriend Tim (Tom Taylor), and inside is a virtual reality headset, which Tim becomes addicted to against Ingrids wishes. This all culminates with Tim informing Ingrid that he has decided to move to a facility where he will be uploaded into a virtual reality, and even though Ingrid tries to stop him, he still leaves, and Ingrid ends up burning the headset, and going to the diner. We also get a brief chapter on the man from the future, where we learn that the AI they are trying to stop has seemingly enslaved humans in a virtual reality, and subsequently killed half of the population. We also learn that the man from the future lived off grid with his mom, who one day was killed by the AI, leaving the man from the future to join an underground survivalist group, who ultimately ended up sending him back to the past with a hard drive containing safety features for the AI, and instructing him to find the nine year old who invented it that night, and to upload the drive. Outside of this, our remaining characters don’t really get too much of a backstory, and are kind of cannon fodder. Bob is killed outside the diner while the group is trying to escape from the cops who have surrounded the building, while Marie is killed by two-armed mercenaries who we later learn were hired by the AI to stop the group from reaching it, and Scott is killed near the end by an actor who is pretending to be the parent of the child who is programming the AI, and acting as a last line of defense in the home the AI/child are hiding in. But in the end, the remaining members of the group end up coming face to face with an army of hypnotized teenagers who are trying to prevent them from getting to the AI, and in the fight, Mark and Janet use their ray guns to run off and lure the teenagers away, while a giant cat, centaur, hybrid monster thing shows up, and also starts eating the teenagers. This sounds weird I know, but I swear this actually happens. This leaves Scott, Sam Rockwell, Ingrid, and Susan to enter the house of the child where Scott is killed, and Sam Rockwell, Ingrid, and Susan enter a subterranean lair, where they discover the AI, and the child programming it. Ingrid is unable to enter the room due to her allergy, which leaves the man from the future and Susan to confront the child, who they accidentally knock out, resulting in an army of toys assaulting Susan and the man from the future, leading to the hard drive being unusable, and the disembodied voice of Darren and Susan convincing the man from the future to upload the voice to the AI to stop it. But, Susan and the man from the future are incapacitated, leaving Ingrid to come into the room, overcoming her allergy, and before she plugs in the voice, the AI uploads her to the virtual reality, where it tells her that the man from the future is her son, and that if she lets the AI exist, it will upload her and her son to the virtual reality to allow them to live happy lives. This however does not convince Ingrid, and she uploads the voice anyway, seemingly saving the day. The movie then ends with Susan, Ingrid, and Sam Rockwell going back to the surface, where Mark, Janet, and a seemingly reincarnated and normal Darren confront them, and Sam Rockwell notices something is off, and he resets the day using the device on his chest, leaving Ingrid in this reality/future, where the AI did in fact win, and where they are seemingly in the virtual reality. The final scene then shows the man from the future back in the diner, where this time he doesn’t confront the whole diner, just Ingrid, and he tells her the way to save the future is not with the hard drive, it’s by infecting the world with her allergy. The movie then ends, and we are left wondering whether Ingrid believes him or not, and whether or not they were able to save the future.
Now that the plot’s summarized, let’s get into my review. I’ll start off by saying that I did like this movie. I think Sam Rockwell is amazing in everything he’s in, and this movie is no exception. He really is the heart of this story, and I think without him specifically, this movie does not work. In general, the cast as a whole worked great, everyone fit very well as their characters, and their chemistry as a team was very convincing. Another positive note, this movie was funny in the right moments, and even though it dealt with some pretty serious stuff, I do not think this detracted from the story at all, and it really worked here.
I also think the themes of the story work. I personally think that the moral of the story was very anti AI (duh), but it went deeper than just saying, “AI bad”, it really focused a lot on our increasing dependency on AI, and how it’s not just a harmless tool that helps us, it’s something that robs us of our humanity, and even though the companies that make it try to convince you it is benevolent, it sure as hell is not. I thought this worked very well, and I think the point was driven home in an effective manner, while not being preachy, or falling into the mold of just hating technology for shits and grins.
As for some things I didn’t like, I think there’s one too many themes here, which did not get the attention they deserved, and because it fell flat, it didn’t do anything but bloat the runtime. What I’m talking about specifically is the school shooting plotline that revolved most heavily around Susan’s story, but a bit in Mark and Janet as a school shooting happens when they’re at school as well. I understand what Gore Verbinski was going for here, and I really appreciate the idea to include this element in the story, because I do think the intention was to focus on how school shootings have just become so routine that everyone has stopped trying to solve the problem, and more so just focused on living and adjusting to it, with this leading to Susan getting the clone and voice box Darren, but I don’t think enough time was spent on this. I feel like this kind of just got pushed to the side by the clone acting odd and the voice box Darren just being used to get Susan to the diner and as a plot device for the finale, which I think is a bit of a shame because the idea that these characters live in a semi realistic world in which school shootings have become the norm and people just learn to live and adjust to it is awful, and I would have liked if the story went more into detail on this. I know runtime is a constraint and the main point of this movie is anti AI reliance, but they were just on the cusp of something great with this plot point, and I wish they focused a little more on this, instead of bringing it up, and then going right back into the AI. Overall, I think this was a bit of a drop on their end, and if it had been explored in a bit more detail, I think it would have made the movie better.
Get The A-List Blog’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Another critique of mine is that I think things did kind of taper off a lot toward the end. It just kind of felt like the story lost it’s momentum in the third act, and things kind of moved away from showing us what the AI is and why it is bad, and more so just toward a metaphorical hand wave. What I really mean by this is it just felt like the movie ended with the characters going, “yeah, yeah, AI bad, let’s do this, oh we won, cool, oh wait, actually we lost, but here’s how we can win”, which was a bit unsatisfying. Things also got a bit too weird at the end for my liking. Notably, after Sam Rockwell resets the night, Ingrid is rushed away to a hospital, and Mark is eaten by the giant hybrid cat centaur monster, and the final scene we see is the monster spraying confetti from a giant CGI dick, which tonally felt weird, and didn’t really fit with the rest of the movie. I don’t think this was the most atrocious thing, but it just kind of felt out of place in a movie that is trying to show how AI robs us of our humanity, while also slightly touching on how school shootings have just become the norm, and that people aren’t trying to stop them anymore.
In the end, I just think that this is another example of how endings are hard to write, and while this didn’t ruin my viewing experience, I just felt that everything tapered off quite a bit toward the end, which did make me enjoy the movie less.
I still think this is worth the watch, and it does make some really great points about how AI is evil, and that we should not trust it, much less be using and relying on it, and even though the school shooting plotline was a little lackluster, I do think it still made some great points, and hit the nail on the head for that issue.
Overall, because of this, I rated this movie as a 3 1/2 stars on Letterboxd, and I did give it a like as well.
Conclusion
Dare I say it, this may be a damn good movie week! I mean, Goat wasn’t my favorite movie of all time, but it certainly wasn’t bad, and I did like Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and Crime 101 at least seems good, so we may have an elusive great movie weekend.
Jury’s still out on that one though, so don’t forget to check back in tomorrow for my next review featuring Crime 101! See you tomorrow everyone!
