'Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die' Has a Terminal Case of the Zanies.

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Years ago, something like Gore Verbinski (the guy who directed all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and also The Weather Man) releasing his first movie in nine years seems like it would be a bigger story. These days it’s just something that happens in mid-February that passes by with barely a blip. While I wouldn’t say I miss advertising, I do miss advertising’s power to inform the general public about which movies are playing.

In any case, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die stars Sam Rockwell and Juno Temple in Verbinski’s first film since A Cure for Wellness, in 2016 (before that was the infamous Lone Ranger flop in 2013). While I’d love tell you that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a return to form from the guy who gave us The Weather Man, the Mexican, and the Budweiser frogs (no, really!), instead it made me remember why I mostly hated all those Pirates of the Caribbean movies in the first place. Will this man die if he directs a movie without a hopelessly convoluted plot? The unsupported twists, they sustain him!

The shame of GL, HF, DD (written by Matthew Robinson) is that you can recognize in it some misanthropic, brutally honest, gleefully satirical core that shows genuine promise, right up until it gets buried underneath three levels of videogamey contrivances. It feels like two or three above-average episodes of Black Mirror got shoved into a failed riff on Everything Everywhere All At Once.

The opening shot alone speaks to the movie that could’ve been. In a deft establishing shot set inside a diner we’ve probably seen in 12 different movies, Verbinski establishes, in just a few efficient seconds of screen time, that this formerly communal gathering space has been transformed into a series of disconnected cells, by patrons who are all roaming different virtual worlds on their phones, oblivious to one another. Hey, kid, stop all the downloadin’!

Sam Rockwell plays our hero, a bearded, filthy kook who bursts in wearing a translucent vinyl raincoat with a series of a busy gadgets strapped to his chest. I always wonder what the Hollywood spin-a-wheel looks like that takes a very conventionally attractive man like Sam Rockwell and spits out “kooky guy,” and then he has to do that in every subsequent movie. Luckily Rockwell happens to be very good at it. Anyway, Rockwell jumps up on the counter, starts kicking phones out of people’s hands, and screams that he’s a time traveler from the future, come to save us from the shitty failed timeline in which we’ve all been forced to live. We’ve all been infantilized by social media, he exhorts, rendered too dumb and docile to resist our fascistic tech overlords.

When he says he’s assembling a team to join the revolution and try to fix this before it destroys humanity, I for one was ready to carry a spear for him. There’s a better, more straightforward version of GL, HF, DD that offers a more strident, less couched-in-zaniness take on the premise. That one probably goes something like “How to Blow Up a Data Center,” and in fairness would surely be much harder to finance.

Getting his team together is tough sledding at first, both because Rockwell’s character looks like a crazed homeless person, and because he’s much less clear on what the revolution looks like than why it’s necessary. The latter in fact seems as much a flaw of the movie as it is with Future Man’s pitch. He also intimates that he’s lived a version of this scene hundreds of times before, Groundhog Day-style (screenwriter Matthew Robinson’s IMDB says he’s in the process of writing a sequel to Edge of Tomorrow, the culty Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt sci-fi riff on Groundhog Day).

Eventually he does manage to assemble a team, whose principals include Haley Lu Richardson (the girl from White Lotus S2 who only has one facial expression), a children’s party princess who’s allergic to cell phones and wifi; Michael Peña and Zazie Beets as two long-suffering high school teachers (points for not having Peña play a cop or security guard); Juno Temple as the mother of a 14-year-old who was killed in a school shooting; and a handful of other less-important tokens like Boy Scout leader and Uber driver. As the gang makes their way out of the coffee shop towards the house of a 9-year-old boy who is supposedly about to invent the AI that destroys humanity, the film dissembles, Pulp Fiction-style, into some of the backstories of each character.

In Michael Peña’s flashback, he’s the new English teacher at the local high school, where the kids are all on their phones and the teachers all seem to be “on sabbatical.” “Do you guys know who Leo Tolstoy is?” he asks, holding up a copy of Anna Karenina. “A boomer?” one of the kids offers, barely listening.

Robinson’s take-no-prisoners approach to screenwriting does manage, especially in the early going, to hit on some of the most essential truisms of contemporary American existence — like the terrifying, know-nothing nihilism of Gen Alpha and Zoomers. They love to just stare blankly at you until you leave them alone.

Likewise, the most intriguing flashback involves Juno Temple’s character, who arrives to her son’s school to find that he’s been killed in a school shooting, and that everyone seems curiously blasé about it. She’s directed to a mysterious tech company who promise to clone her murdered child, and recreate his personality using a proprietary mix of interests and traits, with the caveat that she can only choose one attribute per screen. Would you say he was “weird” or “fun-loving?” Did he like “sports” or “videogames?” Would you describe him as “tall” or “barely hanging on?” Later at a support group for other parents of cloned school shooting victims, a couple reveals to her that their child and her four subsequent clones all died in school shootings. “So this latest one, we just decided to have fun with it.”

Damn!