Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die evaluate: Banal, quirkcore sci-fi

Everything in regards to the man from the longer term (right down to his lack of title) exudes the form of over-designed quirkiness that defines the movie’s model, tone, and story. He waxes on continuously about having finished this world-saving train 117 instances (all of which have failed, in fact), shouts odd non-jokes like, “See if you can survive the calorie burn of a temporal rift!”, and dons an offbeat plastic gown overflowing with tubes that appears prefer it was pieced collectively from toy scraps in a kids’s science museum. He playfully insists it’s the peak of future vogue when he’s accused of trying homeless (“Our homeless look dead!”). This is all shot by director of pictures James Whitaker, who delivers uninteresting, darkish, and dirty cinematography with pops of over-saturated colour—a wierd mixture seemingly designed to intensify the movie’s oddities, however one which merely makes the aesthetic appear extra inconsistent than off-beat.

Though the movie’s messaging positions it as a protector of humanity, an advocate of originality, and a staunch protester of AI-generated content material, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die reeks of market analysis aimed toward triangulating the buzziest matters within the U.S., resulting in a potluck plot that includes faculty shootings, cellphone dependancy, digital actuality, and AI’s rising dominance in society. This marriage of topics has the potential of any assortment of headlines, however the messy mixture is each contrived and campy—a bit like The Faculty, however it’s the scholars who’re peculiar this time. There’s a quick interval originally the place the intersection of youngsters glued to their telephones, the disturbingly informal remedy of highschool college students routinely getting killed at school, and the ominous presence of a wierd company entity referred to as “Again” present some promise of that potential. Intriguing questions blossom. “Why are the kids advertising to each other on their devices?” “Why are they so rude and confident in their stonewalling of the teachers?” “Why aren’t the adults doing anything about it?” Yet, it’s all dealt with with such apparent lack of realism that it’s clear there should be one thing else happening. Instead of unveiling their playing cards strategically to conjure extra thriller, Verbinski and Robinson merely lay all of them out on the desk.

Bouncing forwards and backwards between the previous and current—diving into every character’s backstory and returning to the central, world-saving state of affairs—Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die tries to cleverly piece collectively a puzzle-like reveal as if to shock an viewers who’s been staring on the cowl of the field the entire time. Editor Craig Wood—who labored on all of Verbinski’s early profession classics—can’t appear to shake the standardized studio modifying developments he’s picked up over the past decade modifying movies prescriptively for Marvel and Disney. And, at two hours and 14 minutes, the predictable film’s apparent plotting by no means appears to finish. The starry forged (together with Rockwell, Zazie Beetz, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, and Juno Temple) appears promising sufficient to raise the script from its cringe-inducing dedication to engineered eccentricity, however even they will’t save this hyper-trendy content-farm movie from itself.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die finally ends up being the most recent and least partaking entry in a form of Twenty first-century quirkcore cinema, which reached new heights with movies like Sorry To Bother You, Kajillionaire, and Everything Everywhere All At Once and has since fallen flat as a sure sort of constructed oddity has turn out to be normalized. This foolish, simplistic sci-fi journey means to be thought-provoking, however the irony of its banality is extra recoiling than provocative.

Director: Gore Verbinski
Writer: Matthew Robinson
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Tom Taylor, Juno Temple
Release Date: February 13, 2026