Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die — FILM REVIEW

by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

You should chortle. Teenagers have turn into so hooked on their cell telephones that they’ve turn into fully disconnected from actuality. School shootings have turn into so commonplace that these unaffected are within the minority, social outcasts even. There’s additionally that nuclear winter to stay up for, a whole breakdown between the youthful era and their elders (like, the actually previous: these previous thirty), and don’t get the movie’s director Gore Verbinski began on AI… To its credit score, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is not possible to explain in a nutshell, however one would possibly say that it’s a chillingly satirical dystopian Groundhog Day within the method of Terry Gilliam. Gore Verbinski, maybe finest recognized for steering three of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and the Lone Ranger fiasco, has, after a ten-year hiatus, created one thing really unique, a whacky time-travelling epic that addresses critically necessary points in a wildly entertaining manner.

The movie begins promisingly, the place, in a Los Angeles diner, the 47 clients are quietly having fun with their meals and absorbing the content material on their telephones. Then a shaggy, dirt-encrusted stranger in a plastic raincoat seems out of nowhere claiming that he’s there to avoid wasting them from the long run. He (Sam Rockwell) maintains that he has entered the identical diner on the identical time 117 occasions earlier than, however has been unable to reach his goals with the lacklustre assist of these he has requested to assist him. Not surprisingly, the shoppers imagine him to be mad, however are considerably stunned by how a lot he is aware of about them. This time, he wants seven volunteers, hopefully the best ones to assist him to reach his mission. He wasn’t positive about Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), in her shabby Disney princess costume, however when a spinning Cholula bottle rests at her ft and factors at her, he provides her to his posse…

Like all off-the-wall masterpieces, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is simply too extraordinary to enchantment to all tastes, but when one is prepared to go together with it, it yields many pleasures, guffaws and priceless moments to faucet into your worst nightmares. When an alarm bell rings out via the corridors of Glenhurst High, a nonchalant workers member explains that it’s not a hearth drill, simply one other faculty taking pictures. When poor Susan (a mousy, heart-wrenching Juno Temple) attends a gathering for the bereaved, she is requested, “is this your first?” When she’s supplied with a precise clone of her murdered son, she’s supplied a less expensive mannequin as a result of he comes with advertisements. And so it goes…

If the movie is upsetting, it’s intentional. This is satire with tooth. With fixed warning indicators scattered throughout us, society ploughs on regardless, heads bowed in denial, as we head in the direction of our cataclysmic finale. Still, if we’re going to stumble off the precipice, we’d as effectively die laughing.