‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ Review: Save the World, Put Down Your Phone

Nine years after his last feature—and nearly twenty since his last halfway decent one—Gore Verbinski returns with an anarchic, acid-tinged action comedy that wants to double as a satire of our permanently unstable present. Somewhere between science fiction, absurdist farce, and high-concept adventure, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die often plays like several episodes of Black Mirror awkwardly stitched together, only with a blockbuster-sized budget and the pacing of a major studio tentpole. At its core, it’s an intermittently funny comedy about technological obsession—social media, artificial intelligence, everything mediated through the smartphone—that runs out of punchlines well before reaching its generous 134-minute runtime. Still, for all its excess, it’s the most engaging and likable work Verbinski has delivered since the early (and best) days of Pirates of the Caribbean.

The film kicks off with a premise straight out of a sci-fi mash-up—equal parts Terminator, Back to the Future, and Total Recall—yet unmistakably rooted in contemporary anxieties. Sam Rockwell plays a man who looks less like a time traveler than a street-corner prophet. Claiming to be from the future, he storms into a well-known Los Angeles restaurant—Norms on La Cienega Blvd.—to warn diners that what lies ahead is catastrophic, and that their addiction to mobile phones will ultimately lead humanity to the scaffold. Unsurprisingly, no one listens; everyone remains hypnotized by their screens. To be fair, he has the air of an apocalyptic crank shouting about the end times—but some of what he says suggests insider knowledge. He knows people’s names, what they’re doing, even what they’re about to order.

His explanation: he’s already made this trip over a hundred times, each attempt aimed at assembling a team capable of stopping the person he insists will create the technology destined to wipe us out. And he has failed every single time. This is just another loop, and he’s willing to recruit strangers if necessary. Naturally, nobody volunteers—until his threats (he may or may not be carrying a bomb) and his scathing observations about their screen-soaked habits push a small group into action. Among them: a couple played by Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña, a silent, unsettling woman (Juno Temple), and a perpetually irritated young woman dressed like a princess (Haley Lu Richardson), among a few others.

From there, the film adopts an episodic structure—its most overt nod to Black Mirror—detailing the backstories of each recruit and the technological addictions that derailed their lives. One chapter unfolds in a school where students ignore teachers in favor of their phones; another examines the algorithmic logic behind attempts to “solve” the now-routine phenomenon of school shootings; yet another follows a character who develops a full-blown phobia of Wi-Fi and mobile signals. Each mini-story functions as a closed loop while gradually feeding into the central premise: that emerging AI systems are already exerting round-the-clock cognitive control over their users.

The critique itself—and the repeated returns to the group’s present-day mission—are the film’s strongest elements. But by the midpoint, Verbinski pivots toward a strain of action-suspense that’s only marginally more deranged than the norm, as though the film’s own construction couldn’t escape the very formats, algorithms, and automation it’s condemning. The “addictive” rhythms of its storytelling, and even its hyper-stimulating visual grammar, aren’t all that different from the content the fictional masses consume on their phones. The line between critiquing an addiction to sensory overload and tacitly indulging it becomes increasingly thin—and eventually snaps.

Even so, throughout its first half—and in scattered moments thereafter—Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die remains entertaining, unruly, and surprisingly sharp in its jabs at online culture, particularly the uncritical posture younger users seem to adopt toward it. At times, the film frames its conflict as a generational standoff: a group of over-30s (practically ancient by the standards of the under-20 crowd) recoiling in horror at smartphone dependency, versus teenagers seemingly incapable of looking away from cat videos, prospective hookups, or endless viral dances. To such an extent that many of the antagonists trying to thwart the mission are, in fact, adolescents. There are deeper forces lurking behind that totalizing devotion—but the basic tension holds.

Screenwriter Matthew Robinson ultimately struggles to break free from formula as the narrative progresses. There are a few clever reveals and unexpected connections among the characters, but the film’s second hour devolves into a chain of repetitive action set-pieces that feel like the cinematic equivalent of scrolling through TikTok dance clips: instantly absorbing, seemingly endless, and leaving the nagging sense that an hour has passed without anything of substance actually happening. The film recognizes the irony, but instead of resisting it, leans in—making clear that any meaningful resistance to formulas, algorithms, and artificial intelligence is far more complicated than it first appears.