Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die: as chaotic as it is inventive (review)

Gore Verbinski signs a freewheeling sci-fi blockbuster, carried by a deliciously crazy Sam Rockwell who reigns over this uncontrollable delirium.

There are two ways of seeing Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. The first: a dilapidated SF blockbuster, a little long and a little talky. The second: a joyfully anarchic pop object that resembles a Terminator rewritten by Charlie Brooker after three RedBulls and an existential crisis on ChatGPT. Gore Verbinski achieves both at the same time. The pitch fits on a corner of the dinner table: a traveler from the future (Sam Rockwell as a punk prophet) arrives in the present to recruit a band of losers and prevent an artificial intelligence from causing the end of the world.

From there, the film becomes a crazy race that slaloms between techno satire, buddy movie and geek apocalypse, propelled by obvious references (from Terminator 2 to Matrix via Gilliam). However, the real fuel is elsewhere: it is Rockwell. Shaggy, ironic, on the verge of breaking down, he plays his temporal messiah like someone who has seen too much of the future to remain polite. Each of his appearances injects a mixture of panic and humor that reminds us that Verbinski remains one of the rare directors capable of making technological paranoia a real spectacle.

Perhaps that’s the problem: Good Luck… advances too much. Ideas arrive faster than they are digested, certain characters disappear as they appeared and the last act transforms the satire into a simple SF battle. Like its main character, the film zigzags and gets carried away. Certainly not everything fits, but the whole retains a rare quality: the impression of being put together by hand, with intuitions and accidents.

Rockwell’s appearance in the diner – a scene both cheap and magnificently choreographed – is enough to remind us of what a cinema can be that still thinks in terms of staging. So you might as well follow this intergalactic guide.

By Gore Verbinski. With Sam Rockwell, Juno Temple, Zazee Beetz… Duration: 2h14. Released April 15, 2026