The use of AI in everyday culture is increasing rapidly to the point where it’s virtualy omnipresent and the concern that many are expressing is ironically lighting up social media as the debate rages on. There’s no debate in the mind of filmmaker Gore Verbinski however, as he’s just released the cinematic equivalent of a middle-aged meltdown on the subject in the form of the unrepentantly gonzo Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die – a film that’s the equivalent of a homeless conspiracy theorist hysterically screaming about the horrors of AI directly in your face while you’re just trying to get money out of an ATM.
However, if that description makes you think that I’m being anything other than complimentary, then you’re way off because despite the fact that the filmmaker’s latest comes at you with all the latent rage and frustration of a man convinced the world is going to end, Verbinski seems to be shooting for a cinematic rant that’s the equivalent of Terry Gilliam at his most irate – and that’s a good thing.
At 10:10 pm in Los Angeles, the doors of Norm’s Diner burst open to reveal something of an eccentric site – even for LA. Standing in front of the bemused patrons is an unkempt man dressed in a plastic mac and adorned with cobbled together tech who loudly proclaims that he is from a doomed future and he’s here to try and save the world from the threat of AI. What’s more, he’s claimed he’s tried this exact thing before – 117 times to be exact – and he’ll keep trying until he can amass the correct combination of allies that’ll help him stop the rise of a form of artificial intelligence that’ll take over the world which will go online later that night. Obviously, no one believes him despite an impassioned and lengthy speech, so the man from the future announces that he has a bomb on a hair trigger and just picks a group at random.
However, unbeknownst to him, some of the members of his bewildered gang has recently had some bizarre experiences with AI related phenomena themselves that could prove to be vital.
Firstly we have school teachers Mark and Janet who have started to notice that their students are even more lethargic as possible and it has something to do with the fact that they’re glued to their phones. Next we have single mother Susan whose son has recently been killed in a school shooting, but as she’s tries to struggle through her grief, she is introduced to a number of under-the-radar companies that are set up to offer the bereaved a bizarre replacement. Finally, we focus on the recently heartbroken Ingrid who performs as a princess at children’s parties and has been born with an allergy to technology that gives her terrible headaches and nosebleeds whenever she’s in the vicinity.
Are these random strangers (plus a couple more) the key the man from the future has been looking for, or will his 118th attempt fail as brutally as his previous go rounds?
Gore Verbinski is no stranger to making audience friendly movies with a noticable edge – I mean his first film, Mousehunt was basically the greatest Laurel and Hardy movie never made and his remake of The Ring was a rare account of the new version equalling the original. Then there’s the first three Pirates Of The Carribean movies, but while the filmmaker has always had weird sensibilities, they got even weirder once he ditched Jack Sparrow and moved on into stranger fare. However, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die proves to be his strangest by quite a comfortable margin (yes, even stranger than A Cure For Wellness) as he seems to have cast off all desire to make anything remotely resembling a “safe” movie and the resulting movie may be something of an acquired taste, but it certainly gets your attention.
The best way to describe The barely organised chaos is to describe it as a particularly unhinged feature episode of Black Mirror after Charlie Brooker has had a particularly nasty breakdown and much like Sam Rockwell’s nameless time traveller, it feels like Verbinski’s using the film as some raw-throated, impassioned, primal scream that’s occurred in the final days before humanity is utterly consumed by doom scrolling and visual media created by merely typing a sentence. But while this could be in deadly danger of turning into an unwatchable diatribe (old man yells at icloud, anyone?), the director manages to counteract this with a couple of salient points. The first is that Verbinski is approaching this with an amusingly nihilistic attitude that suggests that he fully knows he’s probably pissing into the wind despite him having a massive point and this causes the second point – which is Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is really fucking funny.
Maybe it’s me and maybe I’ve been starved of dark humour that makes us humans out to be petty, idiotic creatures dead set on our own destruction, but it feels like the sort of caustic humour seen in Dr. Strangelove, Brazil and even the likes of Mars Attacks! is rather thin on the ground these days, so it’s incredibly refreshing that Verbinski has delivered a movie that has no compunction about smacking us upside the back of the head and telling us that we’re overwhelmingly fucked as a species. Of course, such an angry, anti-social movie has a few issues – it’s diversion into flashback territory is the reason for the hefty runtime and it loses its grasp on itself frequently during the third act – but when Verbinski’s viciously cruel sense of humor gets the best of him, the cast step up to hold things together.
Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz are good – if a trifle underused – as teachers who stumble across the hypnotic effects of too much screentime as they struggle within their relationship, but Juno Temple is great as the shell-shocked mother who finds that there’s a fallback in place for anyone who loses a child in a school shooting that involves a truly disturbing cloning facility and the questions she has to answer about imputing his new personality is hilariously callous (“I’ll just put sports.”). Even better yet is Haley Lu Richardson’s tech-intolerant Ingrid who spends the film in a depressive haze despite being dressed as a princess throughout, but the real draw here is Sam Rockwell, who might be the only guy alive who could not only do justice to the manic man from the future, but who also manages to perfectly evoke the exact outraged/cynical tone that the director is shooting for. In fact watching him go through his recruitment spiel is so engrossing, so funny and so persuasive, I genuinely think I’d be recruited into his deranged cause to try and save the world.
An angry, fidgety, crazed satire of excess, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die may often suffer from a lack of focus and the occasional stagger into aggressive weirdness will lose you from time to time – but in my opinion that’s a small price to pay for the passion that’s on display here. As a call to arms to get disenfranchised generations to get the fuck outside and touch grass, its admirable, but there’s a sly feeling that the filmmakers are fully aware they’re screaming at a wall. Thankfully, it works as a nihilistic comedy too – just don’t expect all of it to make total sense and have fun. Maybe don’t die too though – yeah, that would be nice…
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