There’s no such thing as a “traditional” career path in filmmaking. But very few people have had a stranger career than Gore Verbinski. Born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he made music videos for NOFX and Bad Religion in the 1990s, and created the (in)famous “Bud. Wise. Er” croaking frog commercial. At the turn of the century, he translated the Japanese horror film The Ring into a huge hit, then created a billion-dollar franchise and made Johnny Depp a megastar after taking a seemingly throwaway assignment to create a backstory for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. When he finally won an Academy Award, it was a Best Animated Feature for Rango.
Verbinski was the king of the 00s box office, but he hadn’t directed a feature film in a decade before his named popped up on Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It turns out, he didn’t lose his chops, he was just waiting for a script which interested him enough to get back on the horse.
For a man used to helming Disney productions with budgets larger than the GDP of many Caribbean island nations, the $20 million Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die must seem like a tiny indie movie. But Verbinski’s direction is sharp and energized. That’s a good thing, because Matthew Robinson’s screenplay presented a high degree of difficulty.
The film begins in an LA diner at 10:10 pm on a busy night. A disheveled man in a plastic raincoat (Sam Rockwell) walks in and announces that the wires and electronic devices strapped to his body are components of a bomb, and the switch in his hand will detonate it. Once he has the diner’s undivided attention, he tells them he is a time traveler from the future, where things are looking exceedingly bleak. He asks for volunteers to help him prevent the looming catastrophe, or else he will blow the whole place up. There being no shortage of delusional people in Los Angeles, the diners all think he’s barking mad — until, that is, he proves he knows all of their names and details about their lives. You see, he’s lived this moment more than a hundred times already, but each time, he and his chose team have failed. He’s looking for exactly the right combination of helpers, but has yet to find it.
At first, no one raises their hand, which enrages the Man From The Future. Then, Susan (Juno Temple) hesitantly volunteers. She is joined by a couple of schoolteachers, Mark (Michael Pena) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), an Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who dresses up as Disney Princesses for kids’ birthday parties. We get their stories in layered flashbacks, which draw a world not too much unlike our own. Susan’s son was killed in a school shooting, which happens often enough that the hospital has a support group at the ready. But soon it becomes evident that the support group is really just a front for a cloning operation that promises to bring back your dead child. If you can’t afford it, don’t worry. They offer an ad-supported model. At Mark and Janet’s school, teachers keep disappearing, and the kids are all addicted to an AI slop app which makes them act like zombies. The Man From The Future tells them he’s here to stop a super sentient AI from being invented/born, and that the team must find the nine-year-old computer prodigy who will create the AI approximately two hours from now. Lots of extremely weird stuff ensues.
Robinson’s script is inventive and topical, but in lesser hands, it might have been clunky. Verbinski’s first good decision is to let Sam Rockwell off his chain. There’s nothing Verbinski likes more than a great actor going stupid big, and Rockwell is the man for the job. The story is both chaotic and episodic, and Rockwell’s job is to holding it all together. Each of the supporting cast gets their own moment in the spotlight. Temple, Pena, and especially Richardson shine in their vingettes. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a tribute to its director’s talents as a ringmaster who knows how to wrangle a big, crazy circus, and make it look easy.