134 minutes; R; directed by Gore Verbinski
Critic’s grade: B+

“Going forward, are we looking at an AI bubble or an AI apocalypse?” That’s the question a tech expert posed recently in an interview on NPR.

The answer is to be determined, says the smart money. And yet, in the not-so-distant future, things are looking pretty scary and bleak, AI-wise. That’s according to the fantastical, wildly conceived dreamscapes and nightmares — some achieved via CGI? — on screen in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.”

The comic sci-fi action pic is Gore Verbinski’s first film since 2016’s underperforming gothic horror film “A Cure for Wellness.” The director’s filmography includes “Pirates of the Caribbean” and two of its sequels, the American version of “The Ring” and celebrated animated feature “Rango.”

With “Good Luck,” he’s headed into new terrain, thematically and visually. It’s a speedy, often very funny head trip of a movie that makes direct or indirect references to the likes of Terry Gilliam‘s “Time Bandits” and “The Fisher King”; Netflix future-tech series “Black Mirror” (nodding to an episode regarding human-channeled advertising); Doug Liman‘s “Edge of Tomorrow”; and even James Cameron‘s “The Terminator.”

Verbinski starts his adventure at a place we’ve visited before. A wild and wooly Man of the Future, played by a game Sam Rockwell in fast-talking, quip-happy hyperactive mode, careens his way around a colorful diner, frightening patrons and generally making a mess of the place. He’s recruiting would-be soldiers in his war to defeat the society-crunching tech overlords and prevent the evils that they’re spawning. It’s his 117th trip back in time, to the same location, he explains. So far, so familiar.

Cajoling and begging, he eventually gathers a crew of combatants — played by Juno Temple, Zazie Beetz, Haley Lu Richardson and Michael Peña — who are variously over-eager or downright reluctant to join the loopy crusade. Particularly since its leader is a testy, potentially disconnected-from-reality stranger who uses a bomb threat to scare his corps into action.

While there aren’t multiverse-style parallel realities at work here, as in the tonally similar anything-goes “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Inception,” the film takes an approach that does sometimes leave a viewer wondering where, exactly, we are in the narrative: Is this the past, the present or are we back to the future?

Verbinski alternates the now-time narrative with flashbacks that help to explain how society got here from there: The soul-crunching disaster now in progress was urged along in part by teens hopelessly addicted to TikTok, parents who just don’t understand eccentric children and school shootings so ubiquitous that an entire kid-cloning industry has sprung up to meet the needs of the loved ones left behind.

That plot strand, with Temple as the distraught mother urged to shell out buku bucks for a replacement kid who’s physically a carbon copy of his dead predecessor, accounts for the film’s creepiest and yet most emotionally affecting plot storyline.

Some of the images and set pieces, including a rampaging Godzilla-sized kitten that relishes chomping human heads, a roving gang of zombified school kids on the attack, a roomful of scary island-of-lost-toys creations come to life (a la “Toy Story”), and a baldheaded, zoned-out little boy atop a mountain of electronic wires and gadgets who is mindlessly pecking at a computer keyboard, amount to visual smackdowns.

The whole thing, in fact, nearly achieves the state of being endearingly wackadoodle. Its saving grace: Aside from that familiar set-up, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” – a slogan from a video game favored by one of the story’s characters – is gloriously unpredictable, even if it’s overstuffed and doesn’t all quite add up.

Who needs perfectly tuned and tightened inner story logic when the goings-on are so heady and this much fun?

Copyright 2026 by Philip Booth. All rights reserved.
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