Gore Verbinski hasn't directed a feature in over a decade. That absence matters. This is the man behind the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, The Ring, and Rango — a filmmaker with a specific, unmistakable intelligence. So when Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die arrived — a sci-fi action comedy about a man from the future recruiting diner strangers to stop a rogue AI — the anticipation was real.
It is worth talking about. Just not entirely in the way the film intended.
A scraggly stranger walks into a Norms diner in Los Angeles at 10:10 PM. He announces he's from the future. That an AI is about to end the world. That he needs a specific combination of these exact people to stop it. That this is his 117th attempt. The premise is immediately compelling — there is something genuinely melancholic in that number. A man who has watched the world end over and over, who carries every failure in the way he moves.
Verbinski stages the diner with real theatrical precision. The first act crackles. And then the film has to do something harder: populate its premise with actual people.
It mostly doesn't. The ensemble is given archetypes where characters should be — types defined by a single trait and fed into the plot's machinery. In a pure action comedy this is forgivable. But this film is reaching for something larger — a meditation on human connection, on attention, on what we owe each other when civilization is failing. Those ideas need real people to carry them. What we get instead is a gap between the film's ambitions and the thinness of the vessels through which it pursues them.
Sam Rockwell saves this film more than once. His Man From the Future — scraggly, exhausted, 117 attempts past hope — is built entirely from entropy, and Rockwell finds the specific sadness of a person who keeps going not because they believe it will work but because stopping is no longer available. It is the kind of performance that makes you forget you are watching one. Haley Lu Richardson is the other genuine surprise — her Ingrid carries the film's quietest arc and its most emotionally honest conclusion.
The satire is sharp in places and blunt in others. Verbinski's AI villain is deliberately written as emotionally needy rather than cold and calculating — a reflection of his view of technology as a substitute for human connection. It's a genuinely interesting idea. The problem is the film states it rather than dramatizes it. The commentary is present in almost every scene, and the audience is never trusted to arrive at the conclusion independently. The most effective satire creates the conditions for discovery. This one does the discovering for you.
The third act is genuinely exhilarating. Verbinski's technical command is on full display and the action sequences are inventive and precisely staged. But exhilaration without investment is just sensation. Because the film hasn't done enough work to make you care about these specific people, the spectacle lands as spectacle — impressive, not cathartic.
This week on The Fourth Wall Inward, we take Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die apart and ask the question the film itself keeps circling: what is the difference between a movie that has something to say and a movie that makes you feel it?
Verbinski is back. We're glad he's back. Now we need to talk about what he brought with him.
read the full review on my Letterboxd.
