Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Assessment: Shock Comedy Makes Fun of AI, Sci-Fi Tropes, and College Shootings

There’s Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), new lecturers at the highschool overwhelmed by the indifference of their college students to literature, classes, and even survival, as indicated by a faculty taking pictures earlier than lunch that’s handled like simply one other case of the Mondays. Worse nonetheless, is the experiences of Susan (Juno Temple), a single mom who misplaced a son in that morning’s taking pictures and whose grief is handled as a light inconvenience by the authorities who come simply wanting saying, “There’s an app for that.” And then, most mysteriously, stays Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), the diner dressed like a Disney princess and who sports activities a equally unlikely allergy towards wi-fi expertise. Smartphones give her literal nosebleeds. Curiously this real, anti-tech twentysomething is the one particular person Rockwell doesn’t need on his save-the-world group, however tonight he’s feeling goofy. So is his film when it takes time to breathe between its bouts of seething.

The factor to most respect about Good Luck, Have Fun is that it’s as daring as it’s intelligent. Verbinski has seemingly been in director’s jail since A Cure for Wellness, which could clarify why he produced this newest effort himself. The newfound independence has additionally made him defiant. This is a film that performs as flippantly with taboos as Leslie Nielsen does whereas taking the piss out of a Seventies Airport flick. Only the comedy fodder right here is the more and more frequent prevalence of faculty shootings and the overwhelming ennui of a distracted, zombified society.

It is tonally daring, but when we’re being trustworthy, checkered in its success as a comedy or leisure. While Verbinski continues to be finest recognized for the unique Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, together with what’s arguably the very best live-action little bit of fairy mud launched underneath the Disney banner on this century, the filmmaker’s tastes often run extra towards the merciless and sardonic. Mouse Hunt is Looney Tunes if Elmer Fudd was a self-pitying divorcée trapped on Sisyphus’ hill; The Ring was a curse film that delighted in a mom corrupted into complicity by a murderous video tape. Thus Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die turns into an anti-tech parable which takes pleasure within the sight of a passive-aggressive Verizon-like salesman pushing the fundamental “comes with ads” mannequin of a useless child’s alternative clone on the boy’s grieving mom.

A fundamental description of this state of affairs, which Temple’s misplaced guardian finds herself in throughout a flashback, reveals how slippery Robinson’s screenplay may be. And the best way that Verbinski’s misanthropic mise en scène drifts between happy-go-lucky and a malice-choked cackle throughout these gags may be uncomfortably humorous. At instances. Often although, one finds themselves in a comedy the place solely the film seems to be having an excellent time.

The viewers may be gained over fairly a bit, particularly when Rockwell’s pure rhythm and physicality is given house to information the ensemble by means of inconceivable escape scenes and tightly edited visible gags. For one of many pioneers of blockbuster CGI spectacles within the 2000s, Verbinski additionally reveals a welcome nostalgia for the previous methods, and Rockwell as a matted, previous his sell-by date John Connor makes for an excellent anchor of combat scenes that solely partake in CGI throughout moments that appear designed to mock a grim way forward for AI Slop and Sora overlords.

Some issues by no means change, nonetheless, and like each Verbinski film since 2007, Good Luck’s conclusion overstays its welcome whereas piling one undesirable twist onto one other because the movie insists upon, repeats, and exhausts its timey-wimey harangue.