Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die! (2025 | USA, Germany, South Africa | 134 minutes | Gore Verbinski)
Much of director Gore Verbinski’s three-decade filmography consists of crowd-pleasing popcorn movies, imbued with a core of strangeness—anarchic wolves decked out in would-be blockbuster sheep’s threads.
His shiny-on-the-outside/oddball-on-the-inside approach has hit pay dirt more than once. The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, a soused Monty Python-style parody disguised as an assembly-line swashbuckler, became a mammoth hit, as did his wonderfully disorienting 2002 Americanization of the J-horror classic, The Ring.
Even Verbinski’s most meh movies feel like game attempts to at least do something different. His 1997 feature debut, Mouse Hunt, may be teeth-grindingly imbecilic, but it also exhibits considerable creativity in fusing Tom and Jerry cartoons and Home Alone with the visual sensibility of a Jeunet and Caro film.
But time (and box office receipts, alas) wait for no one. And abject failures like The Cure for Wellness and The Lone Ranger made bankrolling Verbinski’s films risky.
It’s unlikely that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die!, Verbinski’s latest, will become a hit on the level of his biggest box-office cash cows. It’s independently financed without the PR muscle of a Disney-type corporate megalith behind it, and Verbinski’s engagingly skewed sensibility feels more undiluted than usual here.
Those tangential caveats aside however, this brand-new Verbinski joint finds the director at the top of his proverbial game. He’s delivered a supremely enjoyable time–(and-genre-) hopping entertainment, with a beating heart, sharp-witted satire, and some genuinely thought-provoking ideas informing its action-packed, frenetic, and often very funny framework.
Good Luck opens amidst the environs of Norm’s, a beloved Los Angeles diner, when dinner rush gets abruptly stormed by a scruffy, wild-eyed man (Sam Rockwell), claiming he’s just arrived at this exact moment, straight from the future, for the 117th time.
He states that humanity faces subjugation and extnction by unchecked AI, unless things get nipped in the bud here in the present. Key to the mission of this Man from the Future (we never do find out his name) is gathering the right combination of disparate restaurant patrons to aid in the world’s salvation.
From there, Rockwell’s Holy Fool and his team of Everyfolks race through a hero’s journey rife with cops sniffing for domestic terrorists, zombie teenagers, narrow escapes, assassins, physical peril, loss, and more than one deliberately silly but genuinely threatening Big Bad.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die! frequently skirts familiar turf, but Verbinski and company sidestep spot-the-influence cynicism by hurtling scores of those touch points at the audience with infectious energy and impish wit. Matthew Robinson’s clever script cherry-picks elements from 12 Monkeys, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Black Mirror, and loads more, then it inverts or lampoons the lot of them.
Verbinski, for his part, takes to this melange of elements like a duck to hallucinogenic water. In addition to the above riffs, his directorial bag of tricks includes especially choice hat-tips to Repo Man and Ghostbusters, and he keeps the momentum barreling forward with an assurance that keeps things from flying completely off the rails (sidebar not sidebar: Don’t let the two-hour-plus running time scare you—this thing moves). The gags, and the action, find a perfect avatar in Rockwell, whose time traveler whirls through the film’s first two-thirds like Bugs Bunny playing Michael Biehn’s role in a Looney Tunes riff on the original Terminator.
But by the time the end credits roll, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die! transforms what could’ve been an average sci-fi action flick into something more. The main storyline’s peppered by backstory sequences not far removed from anthology segments. Cumulatively, those pieces sculpt a lot of the diner patrons/reluctant heroes into living, breathing entities, adding much-needed context and emotional impact as a result. And Rockwell cements his acting bona-fides by finding real pain and vulnerability beneath his wise-cracking, motormouthed surface as things progress.
Strangely, I thought about author/genius satirist Kurt Vonnegut’s writing as much as any cinematic antecedent throughout Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die!. A very specific mix of absurdism, wry black humor, and compassionate humanism courses through this movie and Vonnegut’s work. Verbinski and Robinson also share Vonnegut’s tendency to eschew technical minutiae in favor of free-wheeling creativity and emotional connection.
The parallels don’t end there. One subplot/flashback, in which a mom (Juno Temple) loses her son in a school shooting only to contemplate getting him cloned, juxtaposes tragedy and bureaucracy-fueled absurdist humor straight out of a short story in Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House. Rockwell’s comically prickly, smart-assed but essentially noble lead could be any one of several Vonnegut protagonists; he even time-hops in a similar (if much more controlled) manner akin to Slaughterhouse 5’s central character, Billy Pilgrim. And a death early in Verbinski’s movie likewise echoes that particular book’s harrowing execution scene.
Maybe it’s reaching a bit to attach that weight to what’s essentially a fun sci-fi action thrill ride, but the fact that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die! even remotely invites that comparison makes it more substantial—and special—than 95% of the product Hollywood’s likely to release this year. If it’s not a billion-dollar hit on the level of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, it damn well deserves to be.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die! opens today, Friday, February 13..
Image courtesy Briarcliff Entertainment.