Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die might well take the award for ‘film title’ of the year if such a thing were to exist.

Attention-grabbing, evocative, curious and weird, it rather sums up the film itself.

Gore Verbinski’s latest so plaining wants to be Everything Everywhere All At Once whilst also riffing or homaging plenty of other sci-fi and time travel movies. It doesn’t ultimately get there (what ever will?) but it has a hell of a lot of fun trying.

An oddly dressed, rather dishevelled guy walks into a diner claiming to be from an apocalyptic, AI-ruled future and needs to gather a select group of individuals to save the world that very evening.

A good premise and one augmented by flashbacks to some of the selected crew to flesh out their stories.

The portmanteau is a winning formula and the actors to a great job to each pull you in quickly to their respective journeys.

However, as we go from initially feeling like it’s a ‘five minutes into the future/present day’ setting to it very clearly already being a tech-heightened hellscape the film starts to lose a little grip on its coherence in favour of ever more wild tangents.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of these tangents work. Each flashback is its own ‘mini–Black Mirror’ segment and the initial two are played for some morbid and prescient laughs.

It just creates the impression that ‘anything goes’ which serves to just throw off the key throughline of the plot a little.

It builds to a strong finale with a couple of decent twists and reveals but means you’re left a tiny bit cold at the end, unlike the aforementioned Everything Everywhere… which is more steeped in humanity and feeling.

It’s trying very hard. A lot of the laughs land, the sci-fi elements are great, the messaging is pretty current and not preachy and the cinematography has some nice touches.

However, perhaps with a little tightening or maybe even spread to a mini series, you feel this could have been even better.

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