Review by Tim Robins
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026) is a shouty, slapstick time travel adventure that reminded me of better movies, but still succeeded in entertaining me right to the end.
The film’s director Gregor “Gore” Verbinski is, perhaps, best known for the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies and, the Oscar-winning animated adventure Rango (2011). It is the spirit of madcap adventure that separates Good Luck, Have Fun Don’t Die from Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (itself an adaptation of 1962’s La Jettee) to which it has been compared. But there’s none of Gilliam’s claustrophobic sense of paranoia, and certainly little of Gilliam’s eye for detail, to which the costume of this film’s time traveller gestures.
Sam Rockwell plays the traveller who arrives in an American diner to recruit a team to go with him to the future and defeat an AI that has turned us into drooling consumers of virtual reality. This is his 117th attempt to win against the machine, so far each has ended in failure. This life or death struggle has taken on the quality of a computer game, with the traveller resetting events each time he and his companions are “killed”.
There’s no explanation as to why the diners contain the perfect resistance force, just that winning requires recruiting just the right combination of people. This time out, the recruits include a couple of school teachers, Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a sketchy children’s entertainer with an allergy to technology. Some of the characters’ backstories are revealed in Black Mirror-ish flashbacks of a not quite present in which, for instance, victims of school shootings can be returned to their parents as clones.
The script manages to boot step its way over any paradoxes that might come to mind. The alternate pasts and futures begin to look implausible. Are we really supposed to believe that the time traveller and his mother hide out in a bunker until an AI controlled drone discovers them? Or that the future will include a gigantic, real life, cat with cloven hooves and a body composed of the faces of mewling kittens? Could it be that everything we see, past, present and future, are simply a virtual reality game?
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was fun to watch and certainly raised a lot of laughs from the audience. The film won me over, without getting bogged down in twisty turny, timey wimeyness. Its amiable cast certainly helped, and so did the serio-comic situations, which see Mark and Janet pursued by students zombified by smart phones and Ingrid struggling to succeed as a Disney Princess, while her boyfriend falls in love with a virtual reality.
Being fun without entirely insulting my intelligence was no mean feat. At the outset, I thought we were going to be treated to a dramatisation of our government’s deeply misguided media policy.
You think mobile phones are disrupting class rooms? Try travelling back to the 1950s when, as a trainee teacher, my mother had to contend with milk bottles being rolled down the aisle. As for today, ChatGPT is being used by teachers to write their lesson plans and by students to write essays. In the future, maybe AI could be left to question and answer itself and human beings can just get on with their lives.
Good Luck, Have Fun Don’t Die, feels like its script and visuals have been trained on other films: maybe The Matrix, but also Toy Story, with a smattering of The Stepford Wives. Much like the currently predicted future of AI, this was a case of cinema eating itself.
Tim Robins
Good Luck, Have Fun Don’t Die is in cinemas now
POSTSCRIPT: In the spirit of the film, Tim thought he’d ask ChatGPT to write a review of it, too. Hilariously it reviewed the wrong movie, describing it as “raw, reflective, and unexpectedly tender”, and a “thoughtful, grown-up memoir about staying standing when life doesn’t go to plan”. You couldn’t make this stuff up… oh, wait, AI did. As you were…
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A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: downthetubes News, Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews
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