★★★1/2
Deja Vu All Over Again: Film Review of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Image by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Even during a time when genre films have been stretching the envelope of their traditional tropes (cliches?) and norms, there is no easy way to describe Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die. It’s part comedy, part science fiction, part shoot-em-up, part satire, part horror, part absurdist fable, and part cautionary tale–and in this case the whole makes up more than the sum of its parts. Easter eggs (pretty big ones) drawn from classics like Toy Story, The Matrix, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Terminator, and The Butterfly Effect pop up everywhere. The film could be described as a non-stop roller coaster ride driven by the Cheshire Cat, The Mad Hatter, or the White Rabbit himself.
The film opens at Norm’s, a family restaurant. People are sitting at the counter or at tables quietly enjoying their meals when a man (Sam Rockwell) clad in a transparent raincoat and wearing what look like transistors and motherboards on his chest and what looks sort of like an aluminum foil hat on his head bursts in, announcing that he is from the future and he is there to save them from it. He claims that he has come to recruit a combination of people at Norm’s to alter the development of an AI entity which will destroy them all. To keep them under control, the claims he has a bomb, but someone calls the cops anyway.
People there—of course—all think he’s nuts, but the man (he has no name) frenetically gives what sounds like a well-rehearsed, all-too-familiar speech about the mission. He also seems to know odd details about the patrons, including their names and details of their lives and explains that by telling them this is his one hundred and seventeenth-time trip to this particular moment at Norm’s.
Six of the patrons are bullied, coerced, or volunteer to go. The man from the future, with a little help, engineers their escape from the police SWAT team and they escape.
The story abruptly cuts to Mark (Michael Pena) and Janet’s (Zazie Betz) backstory. Janet is a high-school teacher who has arranged a substitute teacher gig for Mark, who is more than apprehensive. In his eleventh-grade English classroom, the zombie-like students are so glued to their smart phones, they won’t even look up at him and when he assigns them Anna Karenina, they refuse to look at the printed copy, looking instead for AI summaries.
Mark, transfixed by the images on a student’s screen, touches it, which sets off a zombie riot. The students start chasing him—at a Night of the Living Dead speed—and the other teachers, who narrowly escape the kids under AI mind control.
After a few more action-packed sequences taking place in the present, the next backstory deals with Susan (Juno Temple) who has just learned her son has died in a school shooting. While waiting to talk to the authorities, she overhears a group of mothers who have also lost their kids but who are nonchalantly discussing their next steps: “Oh, is this your first?” and so on. They help to guide Susan down a very strange path to help her assuage her grief.
The last backstory is about Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) who is allergic to technology. She has a job posing as princesses for children’s birthday parties, which is where she meets Tim (Tom Taylor), a dude who eschews technology until the day a virtual reality headset is delivered to their door. He throws over Ingrid to live in the improved reality provided by the AI headset.
The group manages to make its way to its destination where it confronts a nine-year-old boy, the creator of the AI behemoth, and attempts to end the threat to all mankind. It is then that the rabbit twists and turns every which way.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a frenetic comedy fueled mostly by the frantic energy of Sam Rockwell, whose skill as a comedic actor is vastly underrated. When he enters the diner during the beginning sequences, his self-assurance and confidence in his task seem misplaced—and insane. Yet the tidbits of knowledge (the patrons’ names, details of their lives) he throws out lend him a grudging sense of credibility. Of course, it later becomes obvious that this confidence stems from experience of having traveled to this place many times before.
This particular conceit, including Rockwell’s seemingly callous attitude toward the lives of his comrades, not only underlines the eccentricity of the character, but also subtly defines his desperation to complete his task. In a way, he knows too little about too much—or too much about too little.
When the narrative veers into the backstory, the comedy morphs into caustic social satire. Janet and Mark cannot teach their high school students because they are completely absorbed in the hypnotic images of their smartphones. One student—of whom the teachers are more afraid than the others—is a bully spewing hate everywhere. A living internet troll. There is a running gag about missing teachers going on “sabbatical”. Mark keeps insisting that high school teachers cannot do that.
Susan’s backstory is so darkly satirical, it is difficult to watch. Her son has been murdered in a school shooting and she is understandably devastated, but when other moms—veterans of previous school shootings—treat the incident as if it were parent teacher conference, the reality of our own numbness to this new American tradition is horrifying. When the other moms clue Susan in to how technology can restore her son through cloning, the process of installing his personality—along with ads—is beyond wince worthy. And, of course, the technology is lacking.
Ingrid’s backstory has as many twists as a plate of spaghetti. Her boyfriend is seduced by AI and leaves her. Her job as a birthday party princess is compromised when her little girl patrons acquire more and more smartphones. In a perfect metaphor for the dangers of AI, technology has taken her job and destroyed her life.
One of the really enjoyable aspects of this film is its self-referentiality. Its borrowing and reworking of previous time-travel science-fiction tropes is beautifully done. The manufactured reality of The Matrix, the attempt to put the past right as seen in The Butterfly Effect, the oddly non-slick technology as seen in Everything Everywhere All at Once are not simply cut and pasted into this film. These tropes are revitalized and seamlessly integrated into this oddly absorbing film. While the Easter eggs are prevalent throughout, they seem to rain down near the end. It’s a blast to see some of these old friends from the movies.
Sam Rockwell is brilliant in this role, combining a self-deprecating comedy with a thinly veiled desperation. Juno Temple turns in a beautifully nuanced performance as a grieving mom working to retrieve her son from a cloud bound oblivion. While this is largely Sam Rockwell’s film, it is Haley Lu Richardson’s that transforms it from social satire into a poignant (and somewhat sentimental) turn. She is simply brilliant. The rest of the cast also hand in stellar performances.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a bit of cypher as a movie. It could be described as Philip K. Dick meets Lewis Carroll meets Trey Parker. It could be described as being very similar to the AI it lampoons. This movie has pulled images, ideas, character arcs, and plot twists from a databank of cinematic history just as AI does, but unlike the new technology, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die transforms the ideas that came before it into something entirely new, insightful, and human.
See it. See it more than once.
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