The unhinged sci-fi time travel doomsday comedy wake-up call “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” already feels like a movie people will circle back to years from now and call ahead of its time.
With his first movie in 10 years, director Gore Verbinski (“Mouse Hunt,” three “Pirates of the Caribbean” entries) has fashioned a bold, brave, bellowing cry to the heavens to save us from our cursed present moment. It’s a deeply sharp satire about our obsession with phones and our distraction from reality, and it’s a desperate scream for help, for sanity, before it’s all too late. Which, let’s face it, it already may be.
Sam Rockwell plays an unnamed man from the future who bursts into an L.A. diner one night to try to recruit a group of people to help him save the world, a “revolution to save humanity,” he calls it. He’s heavily bearded, dressed in a clear raincoat and strapped with wires, gadgets and timers, looking like a deranged bomber. Or, as one diner shouts out, “you look homeless, bro.”
He’s heard it all before. This is his 117th time entering the diner and trying to find the correct combination of people to help him save the day, which in this case means defeating a child who has built an AI that will destroy the world. It’s part “Black Mirror,” part “The Matrix,” with pieces of “Groundhog Day,” “T2” and YouTube cat videos thrown in for good measure.
Among the group of recruits Rockwell’s character assembles this time are Susan (Juno Temple), who has recently lost her son in a school shooting; Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), a pair of high school teachers who know first-hand the dystopia of tech’s effect on today’s youth; and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), an outcast who is seemingly just along for the ride, like Ally Sheedy’s “Breakfast Club” character. Oh yeah, and her character is literally allergic to wi-fi.
Each get fleshed out backstories in “Good Luck’s” chapter-style interludes, the darkest of which satirizes school shootings and the culture of acceptance that has grown around them. Verbinski, working from a script by “The Invention of Lying” writer-director Matthew Robinson, walks a very fine line in these scenes, but his gonzo execution and black comic sense of humor allows him to nimbly thread the needle.
At two hours and 15 minutes, “Good Luck” is too long, and it goes a bit haywire in its wayward third act. But this is a movie stuffed with ideas and a lot to get off its chest, and it was never going to not be a bit messy in its execution. All the most passionate pleas for sanity in a world gone mad usually are.
agraham@detroitnews.com
‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’
GRADE: B+
Rated R: for pervasive language, violence, some grisly images and brief sexual content
Runtime: 135 minutes
In theaters
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ review: A bonkers apocalypse comedy
Reporting by Adam Graham, Detroit News Film Critic / The Detroit News
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