(Above: Sam Rockwell in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025). Photo by Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment – © Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment).

By M. Faust

The patrons at a popular LA diner are sedately enjoying their coffee and pie when they are interrupted by a man whose bedraggled appearance and plastic bag garb would seem to indicate he is mentally ill. They try to ignore him as he claims to be a man from the future. He doesn’t get their attention until he tells them that the various machines wrapped around his torso are a bomb. 

Of course we’re already paying attention to him because the camera is focusing on him—that’s the way movies work—and because he is played by Sam Rockwell, whom we know to be the star of this particular movie, which is titled Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. This matters because one of the characteristics of this bonkers movie is to play with our expectations of how effects-driven sci-fi/fantasy movies work.

For the next ten minutes or so, Rockwell (identified in the credits as “The Man From the Future”) commands the screen in a monologue in which he says he is looking for a team from among the diner’s patrons to help him stop AI from destroying humanity’s future. He claims that this is the 117^th time he has done this, in this exact space and with these exact people, and gives enough details about some folk to persuade them that maybe he does know something. 

By this point, we’re all thinking, OK, this is The Terminator mixed with Groundhog Day on the set of the finale of Pulp Fiction. Lengthy flashbacks exploring the recent histories of some of TMFTF’s team unfold with the mundane dystopianism of episodes of the series “Black Mirror”: high school students are turned into zombies by cell phones; a government project clones kids killed in school shootings; a young woman has an allergy to cell phones and WiFi. This is after all what AI does: taking everything that has already been said, written and filmed and regurgitating it back out at us.

As we settle on the main plot and TMFTF leads his team on their mission—their target is only a few blocks away—we eventually stop trying to make sense of it and sit back in the hope that all will be explained in the end. 

You may or may not find that to be the case, but it sure is an entertaining ride along the way. 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was directed by Gore Verbinski, at one point one of the biggest directors in the industry thanks to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It was written by Matthew Robinson, whom I remember for the Ricky Gervais comedy The Invention of Lying, a clever takedown of religion. They here set themselves the task of making an audience-friendly adventure that warns of the dangers of allowing AI to take over our culture, in full knowledge that any such effort will to some degree become an example of what it protests against. It is, as TMFTF notes at one point, a “never ending mindfuck.” Consider that a recommendation.