Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Evaluate – ‘Fun amid the mayhem’

Rockwell’s unnamed character is aware of that someplace, in a non-descript LA eatery on a median night, is the mixture of people who find themselves able to defeating the AI that may quickly carry in regards to the finish of the world — if solely he can put the appropriate group collectively. After greater than 100 iterations, he tries as soon as extra — however this gang, together with bereaved mum Susan (Juno Temple) and terrorised lecturers Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Mark (Michael Peña), simply might need what it takes.

Screenwriter Matthew Robinson beforehand penned the likeably bizarre Dora And The Lost City Of Gold — additionally starring Peña — and an entertaining apocalyptic story in 2020’s enjoyable Love And Monsters. This isn’t as sure-handed as both, with so many concepts pinging round that it could possibly’t at all times marshal them right into a coherent plot, whereas there’s some heavy-handed signposting of some twists and turns. The primary anti-AI thrust feels well timed, however the particulars — cloning in a single scene and TikTok anxiousness within the subsequent — are an odd mixture of implausibly futuristic and boomer-coded. Criticising teenagers specifically for his or her telephone utilization is at all times regressive, nevertheless intelligent the zombie impact that Verbinski in the end makes use of it for. And there’s barely a touch of company accountability right here: this AI future is a strictly home made affair, so far as we will see.

That’s to not say that this lacks leisure worth. Verbinski’s horror background comes into play as he invents new variations of traditional monsters, and Rockwell is immensely enjoyable because the presumably insane chief of the mission. There’s no dancing, however in any other case this leans all the best way into Rockwell’s strengths, giving him fast-paced dialogue and an irrepressible twinkle in addition to deep and lasting trauma and twitchiness. The movie’s in depth flashbacks, giving us context for just a few characters, are attention-grabbing sufficient to counsel that this might have been an anthology TV present, however they stifle the mission’s momentum in favour of patchy world-building. It might need been higher to fold the revelations into dialogue or flashback and focus extra on the difficulty of Rockwell’s sanity or the numerous different questions the film poses about how know-how has modified our relationship with actuality. The future already appears perilous, and fiction has to work onerous to face out.