‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ Review

Both a wonderfully unhinged adventure and an appropriately bleak look at our doomed world, ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ is the movie we need right now.

Yet there’s also a darkness that pervades the film, which imbues even its most absurd scenes with a sense of impending doom. It’s in its bleakest, saddest moments that the film’s message resonates, but there is also room for hope, human connection, and even, perhaps, redemption, for those who know where to look.

It all starts, as our protagonist puts it, “at a f*cking Norm’s in Los Angeles,” where a strange man makes an appearance, one muggy night, claiming to be from the future. Covered in cables and tubes and sporting mismatched shoes, a child’s backpack, and a rugged, see-through raincoat that hides a shiny, steampunk armor of sorts underneath, he tells them that no, this isn’t a robbery, but the future is “totally and completely f*cked,” and it’s all humanity’s fault.

But the Man From the Future (Sam Rockwell, of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) has a plan to save us all from the impending AI apocalypse, and even though said plan has gone wrong a 116 times before, he comes to our patrons with just enough hope to keep going. All he needs to do is find the right combination of people at the diner to join him on his “revolution,” and prevent a rogue artificial intelligence from doing the damage.

Except that our Man From the Future doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Yes, he seems harmless enough, and he certainly means well, but he’s not entirely sane, and he’s definitely flawed. As he proceeds to unleash a 12-minutes-long monologue on a series of customers he claims to “know better than [they] know [them]selves” thanks to his previous trips to the diner, his description of our world rings true. Yet you can’t help but wonder how trustworthy this sleep-deprived, long-winded, paranoid man with a flair for the dramatic and an affinity for swear words really is.

Man From the Future isn’t a reliable hero – he might not even be a hero at all – but that’s what makes Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die the gem that it is. Eventually, and with a little help from fate, some people volunteer, our “weird f*cking group” is found, and the real adventure begins. But what exactly are they fighting for, and how far has AI infiltrated our universe? The more absurd and improbable things become, the more you’ll start wondering about whether anything you’re seeing is real, and it’s this ambiguity that makes the film not just fun and entertaining, but also smart and unpredictable in its approach to its themes.

The movie is best experienced without knowing too much about what happens, but screenwriter Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) finds clever ways to tackle several timely topics – including some controversial ones – with enough humor to keep us engaged, enough heart to remind us of what matters, and enough commentary to always make us aware of the film’s stance on the state of today’s world. The latter particularly shines when we’re treated to flashbacks of key moments in our volunteers’ lives leading up to that night, each depicting a different side to an issue that the team behind Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die wants us to reflect on.

School teachers Janet (Zazie Beetz, of Nine Days) and Mark (Michael Peña, Ant-Man and the Wasp) are so tired of trying to reach dazed, doomscrolling students who are perfectly content in their own ignorance, numbed by a tech-induced hive mind that values conformity over freedom of thought. Juno Temple’s (Ted Lasso) Susan, who has recently suffered a loss, is being offered a puzzling cure for grief that’s being endorsed by a community of people whose disquieting happiness is just making her feel more alone.

“Wind beneath my wings” Marie (Georgia Goodman) – at least, according to Man From the Future – just wanted some pie, and Scott (Asim Chaudhry) didn’t even want to join, but with Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson, of Columbus), it’s a different story. Wearing a worn out, blue princess dress and tear-stained make-up, Ingrid has never been chosen by our protagonist before, who claims to be scared of her “real off-her-meds vibe”, but her hilariously improbable allergy and no bullsh*t attitude to life might just make her the secret weapon he’s never had.

What also helps define all these characters and make the film so effortlessly watchable is its technical execution. DOP James Whitaker’s (Patriot, Hawkeye) uses lighting and color to imbue the movie with a very interesting visual identity; there’s a stillness to the night-time, neon-lit, film noir-reminiscent settings that reflect the ambiguity of its themes. But as more characters are introduced, the movie taps into different genres, from the disquieting atmosphere of zombie and horror flicks to the dark fairytale of a romance gone wrong, with many references to sci-fi, gaming, and pop culture throughout.

The score (Geoff Zanelli) follows the same logic, seamlessly adapting to every scenario, letting us know exactly how to feel in every scene while reflecting its themes by blending gorgeous artificial sounds with epic orchestral cues. And then there’s the irresistibly catchy track that plays over the end credits.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a film that brims with originality. Pop culture-wise, the references are too many to name, and every single viewer is bound to notice something different. To me, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is Alice in Wonderland meets The Matrix, but louder, wackier, and with AI. And there is so much to explore in a movie that’s filled to the brim with clues, from an ad for “Your New Reality” that keeps showing up in the background to the characters’ tendency to foreshadow – or, perhaps, influence – events in a way that sounds eerily similar to someone giving AI a prompt, which questions the truth of the film’s own premise in intriguing ways.

And then there’s the theme of motherhood, which emerges at the exact right time, serving as an anchor that might just give humanity some hope after all. Despite the wackiness, there is some real emotion here too, and it might even move you to tears.

Unsurprisingly, Sam Rockwell excels in a film that feels tailor-made for him. Man From the Future is a very complex character to play as not did it require so much energy from the actor in almost every scene, but our hero is also in constant evolution throughout the movie. While he may come across as a rambling, paranoid, slightly insane stranger, the more we get to know him the more we find ourselves oddly attached to him, even if we don’t always know if we can trust him.

“There’s urgency and paranoia and some danger, and always the bit of bullsh*t that Sam does so well,” explains the director in the press notes for the movie, and that’s exactly it. Man From the Future is a typical Verbinski character: someone who’s self-serving, a little lost, and who might not always tell us the truth, but whom we can trust to do the right thing when it matters. There’s a little bit of Jack Sparrow in our protagonist, especially in his tendency to overdramatize events and in his struggle to contain his emotions, but the script also adds a very special kind of humanity that Rockwell beauitfully delivers in the most unexpected moments.

Women are the real heroes of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and Haley Lu Richardson and Juno Temple in particular deliver fantastic work here. Ingrid has the best arc in the whole film, and Richardson really gets to showcase her range as an actress, combining emotionally intense scenes with iconic, physically demanding ones. Portraying a grieving mother, Temple often had to act on her own here, and she absolutely excels; Susan is someone we can relate to even when she faces the most absurd situations; not only does Temple gives her character so much raw emotion and quiet strength, bringing us along on the journey. and making it look effortless too.

The rest of the cast excels too, with everyone really committing to their respective roles. Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña‘s characters, two teachers at a high school where some weird things start to take place, are slightly less relevant to the overall story than Juno and Richardson’s, yet both get to shine with epic moments and clever references. Asim Chaudhry gets less screen time than most of his co-stars, but he excels in the ‘present’ timeline, always remaining believable even when nothing around him makes sense.

And then there are all the actors who only have a couple of scenes in the whole film yet are given some of its funniest, most wonderfully nonsensical – yet, at the same time, highly disquieting – lines, such as the teenagers and parents who appear in Susan’s timeline and the employees of a certain company where she eventually finds herself. Nothing will be spoiled in this review, but it’s thanks to Robinson’s script and the cast’s skills that this subplot works as well as it does.

Gore Verbinski has been open about the struggles to get this film out there – he states in the press notes that “no studio wanted to make this”. Yet this feels exactly like the movie we need to see at this specific moment in time. On a surface level, the questions Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks us might come across as a simple, and even quite predictable, given our current reality: Why are we letting technology, and AI, rule us? Why aren’t we noticing the dangers of a tool that we still don’t understand, and that’s becoming so good at making us happy by feeding us lies? And why do we spend so much time watching our screens that our lives have become ruled by fake news and social media personas rather of actual human communication?

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die uses sci-fi and satire to address these topics and more, highlighting some very real and worrying issues that define our current society. And if all of this sounds like something you’ve heard before, what you should really be asking yourself is why you haven’t been taking it seriously. When we are so dangerously close to completely losing touch of reality and letting chaos rule, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks us to ponder the most important question of all: Do we even deserve to be saved?

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die will be released in US theatres on February 13, 2026 and in UK & Irish cinemas on February 20. The film will also be screened at the Berlin Film Festival in February.