Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die review – An AI satire that’s the work of a very angry filmmaker

The value of imagination – the real, human stuff AI could never hope to touch – has been put to the test with Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It’s ideologically flawed, structurally jumbled, and a little too enamoured of its dystopian predecessors (shades of Terminator and Edge of Tomorrow here). But it’s also sort of wonderfully personal, cranky and spiked – like an affronted hedgehog trying repeatedly to ram your shin.

A cat-adjacent monster appears at one point, and its design is so silly and aggressively uncool that I found myself feeling warmly affectionate towards it. Filmmaking is so hyperconscious now. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a throwback to when mainstream artists would dare to throw a few ideas at the wall and see what sticks.

Sam Rockwell, playing an unnamed time traveller in a plastic raincoat, turns up to a diner to lecture its customers about how their excessive social media use has robbed them of their dignity. In the future, he warns, half the population will die while the other half are too busy doomscrolling in bed to notice. This is his 118th attempt to divert that course, if only the right people would volunteer for his righteous crusade.

Cut to: a bunch of recognisable faces, among them Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña as Janet and Mark, married teachers; Juno Temple as Susan, a grieving mother; Asim Chaudhry as Uber driver Scott; and Haley Lu Richardson as Ingrid, who was born allergic to electronic devices and wifi.

Verbinski is largely associated with his big-budget successes (three Pirates of the Caribbean films) and one big-budget failure (2013’s The Lone Ranger). But there’s more here than franchise work and studio-friendly competence – there’s the darker, more idiosyncratic streak that once saw him open the third Pirates film with a mass execution sequence, ending with the death of a small boy. His most recent movie, 2016’s A Cure for Wellness, was a thrillingly confounding Gothic delirium appropriately headlined by Mia Goth.

“It’s all your fault, you’re equally complicit,” the time traveller howls, like a man in a comment section, and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die regrettably carries over his interest only in the symptoms, never the causes. No one’s finger ever actually bothers to point towards the corporations who started all this. Matthew Robinson’s script haphazardly starts to dish out backstories for some of these characters (Scott, notably, is left out), and we see Mark and Janet battle through a zombie horde of teens, their features ghoulishly lit by their phone screens.

Still, there’s some genuine venom in Verbinski’s approach, and these vignettes arguably feel more potent than the average Black Mirror episode, because the focus isn’t on impressing cleverness on the audience. Instead, they release a little of the filmmaker’s pent-up frustration. Characters speak in the eerily chipper patter of the Stepford Wives. Police happily gun down hostage victims. A company clones the child victims of school shootings for a tidy fee (there’s a discounted version with ads). The latter is so bleak and mean that it feels genuinely provocative in a way few modern satires dare.

That may, understandably, turn some audiences away, especially when it’s been paired with Rockwell’s typical ping-pong-ball charm. But, as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die gets weirder and weirder, it only further provides the evidence for its own thesis. As the time traveller warns, “AI is going to try to give you everything you ever wanted... but in the end it’s all a lie.” You can call this one messy, but at least it’s honest.

Dir: Gore Verbinski. Starring: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Juno Temple. Cert 15, 134 minutes.

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ is in cinemas from 20 February