Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

What should be a Terry Gilliam-esque misadventure through time and cyberspace opens with a fizzle in Gore Verbinski’s (Pirates of the Caribbean) sci-fi snooze. An off-the-boil Sam Rockwell’s unnamed ‘man from the future’ appears in an LA diner, clad only in a Blade Runner-style plastic mac adorned with bizarre bits and bobs. Holding the joint hostage, he alerts the phone-addicted regulars that he’ll set off a bomb if they don’t pay attention to his madcap plan to save his wilfully lobotomised timeline.

Matthew Robinson’s sloppy screenplay feels like it may have been churned out by AI itself. It’s crammed with leaden exposition and clumsy with hammy dialogue in which everyone over-explains themselves, as if we’re watching it with one eye on our phones. While that may be on brand for a film about a ragtag band fighting back against a mind-numbing cyber intelligence, it makes for a boring two-and-a-bit hours.

It doesn’t help that Rockwell’s time traveller endlessly repeats, to diminishing effect, a monologue underlining the importance of memorable characters, a species that appears to have gone extinct in this fake plastic future. Rockwell, usually dynamite, can’t sell his faded facsimile of Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys, and the film never recovers.

The screenplay feels like it may have been churned out by AI

Haley Lu Richardson, excellent in The White Lotus and After Yang, is saddled with a depressed manic pixie role, right down to wearing a knock-off Disney princess dress. She gets Stranger Things-style nosebleeds when exposed to technology. Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz’s charisma goes missing as high-school teachers terrified of their smartphone-wielding students, as the first wave of AIs attempt to take over the world and replace it with a golden cage of dubiously rendered bliss. 

Juno Dawson, usually excellent, can’t convince us as a grieving mother after a school shooting. British comedian Asim Chaudhry is also in the mix, but the film’s so uninterested in him that he doesn’t even get a drawn-out flashback that establishes all the rest. 

Plot holes abound – as do borrowed ideas and bad CGI. With art, the environment and democracy under threat from our deep-fakes on social media, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die should be searing stuff. Instead, it’s more of a 404 error message.

In US and Australian cinemas on Feb 13. In UK cinemas Feb 20.