Movie Review: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

 

Michael's Movie Grade: C+

Gore Verbinski's new dark sci-fi comedy is a real mixed bag. 

The plot of this movie involves a man from the future who travels back in time and assembles a team to help him stop the future from being overtaken by AI. 

This is a rare modern-day film in which you never know where the story is going. Nearly every twist and turn caught me by complete surprise. I found myself constantly second guessing everything I thought about the plot. This kept me glued to the screen even when many elements didn't work. 

Sam Rockwell is another reason to see this movie. He is simply fantastic and brings a quirky charisma that is perfect for this type of film. As over the top as he gets though, he also does a great job in the more serious scenes.  

Verbinski and writer Matthew Robinson simply have too many ideas and rely too much on being quirky. Though the main story revolves around this group of characters trying to stop AI from taking over the world, there are many side plots and other messages this film is trying to convey. We get various flashbacks throughout that show us what had been happening in various characters' lives up to this point. These flashbacks disrupt the flow of the film completely and some feel like they belong in a different film.

One flashback having to do with a mom losing her son in a school shooting, especially feels out of place with the rest of the movie (though admittedly it does play a role in the story later on). It turns the dark satire on to a different subject, in a way that can feel derivative. It also introduces characters that are simply elaborate caricatures that react in an exaggerated way that no real person would. This goes against the rest of the film, where as over the top as things might get characters react in a way most people would. Taken on its own this section might be the most effective part of the movie. It doesn't focus on an easy subject for satire like AI or cellphones and never plays it safe (the rest of the movie plays it too safe in comparison). It even has the strongest humor in the movie, while providing us with a terrifying message of how prevalent violence is in our culture and the effect that this has. This type of bleak reflection being matched with actually funny dark humor works quite well. If this was its own short film, I would have loved it. However, as a part of a larger movie, it simply feels at odds with everything around it. Comparing the rest of the movie to this makes the flaws of the rest of the movie all the more apparent, especially how the rest of the movie takes on too easy of a target and gives us a simplistic message we have all heard a million times. 

The constant quirky humor doesn't quite work here. It feels like it is trying too hard to be Everything Everywhere All at Once, without ever capturing the comedic highs of that film. Many of the comedic ideas here simply seem to be quirky for the sake of being quirky. For a movie that is so critical of technology, it falls into the same trap as most internet humor. Being random or quirky in and of itself is not funny. There are a few funny moments here but the majority of them fall flat. 

There are some great things about this movie, and it does keep your attention all the way through. However, there are also many times when it takes a swing and completely misses.