Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
It’s a rainy night in Los Angeles and food is served at Norms in plastic baskets, burgers and fries and steak and pie and coffee in an endless and repeating carousel of orders, the staff and patrons absorbed in their own lives, a first date going awkwardly, tired from work, on their phones, their minds elsewhere when the man walks in, dripping fluid, saying he is carrying a bomb and claiming that he is from the future and has come to save them all from themselves.
An artificial intelligence about to awaken within this city which will take over, he believes that in that diner is the combination of people who can help him infiltrate its source and insert a preventative code which will ameliorate its impact; choosing Mark, Janet, Scott, Bob, Marie and – reluctantly – Susan and Ingrid, they seek escape as armed and unsympathetic police show up, the odds already against him and one hundred and sixteen attempts at intervention already having failed.
A mad amalgamation of dystopian science fiction and fractured timelines directed by A Cure for Wellness’ Gore Verbinksi from a script by Matthew Robinson, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die takes its name from a catchphrase within the virtual reality game, Ingrid (Hayley Lu Richardson) already despondent having lost her boyfriend Tim (Tom Taylor) to its addictive grasp, throwing her lot in with the stranger (Mr Right’s Sam Rockwell) because she has nothing else to hold her.
The backstories of Ingrid, teachers Mark and Janet (Ant-Man‘s Michael Peña and Deadpool 2‘s Zazie Beetz) and grieving mother Susan (Kaboom’s Juno Temple) told in flashback, they are all linked, an encroachment of the digital world into their daily lives, superceding reality and forced upon those who would resist, it is big tech which controls the open-ended agenda, the scope of which cannot be comprehended by those who have become test subjects.
A thrill ride of familiar ideas, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die expresses exactly that sentiment, an insane melange of the temptation to fall into a comfortable lie and ignore the truth coming from The Cage, the decline of humanity of Wall-E enacted by the Army of the 12 Monkeys, the children of Midwich in thrall to their cellphones, the promise of the coming technological singularity reflected in the Black Mirror, the final showdown the collapse of The Matrix by the insertion of code into Tron’s Master Control Program guarded by the corrupted ensemble of Toy Story.
Verbinksi’s first film in almost a decade, he has still to learn how to make a film succinctly, and though he is not as indulgent as while riding waves with the Pirates of the Caribbean a trim of perhaps fifteen minutes would have sharpened the refreshed warnings which were made by Max Headroom four decades ago, a generation having grown up in the interim being told that if they just bought the right gadget it would make them happier and complete what was absent in their lives when what is missing is meaning, connection and hope.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is currently on general release
