Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, 2025.
Directed by Gore Verbinski.
Starring Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Juno Temple.
SYNOPSIS:
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die might be the best movie from last year that you’ve never heard of. It’s not perfect, but it’s a fun ride and it deserves a post-theatrical run second life. Unfortunately, there’s only one five-minute bonus feature found here, but maybe a more complete edition will come along eventually.
Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, from a script by Matthew Robinson, deserved better than to earn less than half its budget in ticket sales worldwide. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a lot of fun, and it’s a great example of a filmmaker taking risks in an era where every genre movie is supposed to be part of a franchise.
The film stars Sam Rockwell as an unnamed man from the future who pops into our time at a Norms diner in Los Angeles at 10:10 pm. It turns out he’s been there many times before, because he’s trying to figure out the right group of patrons who will help him stop the dystopian future where he lives from happening.
He looks like a background character from a Terry Gilliam movie, so, of course, everyone thinks he’s nuts, but he spews enough specific information about them that some realize maybe he’s for real. Of course, the police are on the way, so he doesn’t have much time to choose his latest group — the 117th time he’s tried this — and start the mission.
After he lands on what he hopes are the right people this time, the group manages to escape, minus one who dies during the attempt, and the movie shifts into flashbacks that give us some of the character’s back stories.
Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz) are up first. She’s a teacher and he’s the substitute at her high school. When Mark gets frustrated with his students’ refusal to stop using their phones during class, he touches one of the devices and suddenly finds himself being chased by a horde of zombie-like teenagers.
In another, Susan (Juno Temple) is dealing with the unbrearable grief of her son’s death during a school shooting, only to be introduced to a company that will give her a clone of him. Unfortunately, he comes with ads, and his wooden beahvior begins to freak her out, but she’s given a disembodied AI recreation of him on a device, and that version of him tells her to follow the man in the diner.
Meanwhile, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) is a woman who’s allergic to electronic devices, especially any that use Wi-Fi, and she’s in the diner in a depressed state after losing her boyfriend Tim (Tom Taylor) to a VR world in a headset that was mysteriously sent to them.
All of those back stories have a connection to the future that the main character is from, where most people have lost themselves in a VR world, resulting in natural resources to run out and mass deaths.
Admittedly, Susan’s back story doesn’t fit into the present-day story as neatly as the others do, and Ingrid’s deathly allergy to tech seems to vanish when it’s comvenient for the plot, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is still a fun ride from beginning to end. It’s worth checking out just to ensure that movies like this one keep getting made.
This 4K Ultra HD edition also includes a Blu-ray and a code for a digital copy of the film. You might think that a movie released last year would automatically look perfect on home video, but that’s not always the case, since how the film is encoded to disc can make a large difference. Try to shove too long of a film on a disc without enough capacity and you can end up with mosquito noise in the black levels and related issues.
However, there’s nothing to worry about with this one: it looks and sounds great. Unfortunately, any worries about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die not having enough breathing room on the disc are non-existent since the only extra is a five-minute making-of that, of course, barely scratches the surface. Maybe this one will find a second life on disc and/or streaming and some kind of special edition will be released eventually.
Flickering Myth Rating– Film: ★★★★ / Movie: ★★★★
Brad Cook
