Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Review: Apocalypse Now, Then, and the Near Future

I admitted to my editor that I’m not a Gore-head – that is to say, I’m not a die-hard fan of the 10-years-dormant directorial style of Gore Verbinski. But I’m not a hater, I swear: While his take on J-horror classic Ringu I find miscast and overly sentimental, as a child of the Aughts I’m forever sunken in the treasure trove of his Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. (If there are further films in the series, I simply do not know.) Verbinski excels when allowed to saturate his filmic worlds with imaginative ideas and warm colors, and falters, in my opinion, when the narrative needs cold and cool tones in both story and setting. Here, in sci-fi romp Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, screenwriter Matthew Robinson’s time-travel tale attempts to collapse the two ends of the Verbinski spectrum with expectedly uneven results.

The film got its world premiere at Austin’s own Fantastic Fest in 2025 – a fitting first stage for the feature. Moments into the movie’s start, we’re introduced to its primary plot engine: the Man From the Future, played by Sam Rockwell at his most Rockwellian. He bursts into an otherwise humdrum diner, where patrons goggle at him as he delivers an anti-technology diatribe about a future destroyed by inaction against the artificial intelligence menace. A shaggy lead actor, a mundane setting given sci-fi spice, and a quick rattling off of the film’s central pitch – Rockwell’s Man From the Future needs six people to come with him to save the world – all fulfill the Fantastic-Fest catnip check list.

Yet that intense energy can’t sustain the movie’s two-hour runtime, even with charismatic infusions from the star-studded supporting cast. There’s about four different films vying for our attention, from zombie schlock featuring high-schoolers shambling after teacher couple Mark and Janet (an overused Michael Peña and underused Zazie Beetz) to a genuinely affecting dramatic tale following grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple) as the tech industry preys on her suffering to whatever’s going on with birthday princess Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) and her very specific allergy. All that’s framed by a Groundhog Day-esque adventure saturated with exhausting and unearned gallows humor. The overall effect leaves one wishing this were an eight-episode miniseries – a phrase I never expected to write.

And yet, I’m not totally unhappy with the 134 minutes I spent with GLHFDD. Slick scene setting sucks my eyeballs into every goofy getaway chase the ragtag world savers must go on, a reminder of why Verbinski earned boffo box office back in the day. Temple plays the desperate need for comfort, explanation, and security Susan suffers with appropriate weight, and I found her storyline the most compelling out of the million served throughout the movie. The film’s big bad is artificial intelligence, here rendered as a self-creating evil capable of nearly any atrocity. Not an original idea for anyone who sat through both reckonings of Mission Impossible, Dead and Final, where AI was imagined as the all-knowing Entity, but you know what? We live in a world dominated by jerks who want AI to appear as an inevitable future. Every day, Google tries to get me to write a simple email using Gemini; people claim ChatGPT’s misguided responses as reliable sources; and Spec’s ugly generative-art billboards stare us down. Maybe I don’t love every element here in Verbinski and Robinson’s sci-fi treatise on putting down the damn phone, but ultimately? I’m glad they’re on humanity’s side. We need every weapon in this fight, even the ones rated two-and-a-half stars.

This article appears in February 13 • 2026.