FF '25: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
“Director’s jail” seems to be a term commonly used for living directors who haven’t worked in years: visionary filmmakers restricted either by not having any work they want to put out into the world or by the system that won’t allow them to make something new. Sometimes those directors make it out of director's jail, and sometimes they don’t–so when they do, the product that finally breaks them free is always interesting to see.
Such is the case with the latest escapee, Gore Verbinski, and his new film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest this year. Truth be told, this movie snuck up on me, as well as what seemed to be most of the audience; everyone was surprised by its existence, and for good reason. Good Luck is a small film by Verbinski’s standards. Compared to the epics he’s made in the past (Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man’s Chest, At World’s End), this entry in his filmography is a by-the-bootstraps independent film.
Good Luck is an adventure comedy about a Man from the Future (Sam Rockwell) who travels back in time to the present day with the goal of assembling a team to stop a world-ending AI from coming to fruition. This isn’t the first time he’s gone on this journey, but he's determined to make it his last. Alongside his ragtag team (Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, and Juno Temple), he traverses the Los Angeles streets to find the AI’s home and the moment where the future is written.
The movie is told within episodic chapters that show how each character ended up on this team in the first place, and it covers A LOT of ground. Almost an overwhelming amount of ground. Subjects like school shootings, cloning, AI, and the presence of technology in our schools and modern-day society are all crammed into a two-hour runtime that rides the line between being poignantly funny and exhausting. It’s clear Verbinski is angry and confused about how we ended up here, but at times this can come across like an old man yelling at kids to “stay off their damn phones,” reminiscing about the days when the only way to keep up with gossip was on the playground or while playing outside with your friends.
Sam Rockwell chews up each and every scene he’s in, leaving nothing behind. From his opening monologue in a diner trying to recruit his team to his big closing moment battling the AI, he’s clearly having a good time with what's given to him. A lot of respect to him for leaning into the chaos of the movie and being a proper guide through all of it. The rest of the cast is also having a good time, taking what seems like a light-hearted break from roles that require them to be a bit more subtle.
That’s the biggest issue here: the movie is far from subtle. Everything is meant to hit like a sack of bricks, whether you like it or not, which can get exhausting by its end. Juno Temple’s character Susan is a mother who loses her son in a school shooting and is given a lifeline to help her through it: cloning him. Other parents in this universe have repeatedly cloned their children, and Susan joins a club of those trying to cope with this fact while also avoiding acknowledging that having their kid back feels weird. Temple plays this part pretty straight, letting the humor around her play out, which results in some of the movie’s biggest laughs. If Good Luck had more structure like this and found more ways to handle these large issues with humor, it probably would have gone over better; instead, by the conclusion, we’re looking at AI-generated cat-zebra hybrid monstrosities with massive dicks swinging right into the camera. It comes off as unbalanced with some of the smaller stories, but also finds some way to fit the larger narrative. Points to the movie for hiring artists to generate these images when it likely would have been significantly easier to use AI to do so.
Overall, it’s good to see Gore Verbinski out of director's jail, and it’s nice to see a comeback, even if all of it doesn’t work all the time. For the most part, the movie is a fun rip at the outrageous times we’re living in. It doesn’t hold back its feelings on the absurdity of any of it, for better or for worse, and is the type of film that you don’t really see getting made today. In part a throwback to 2000s comedies like Dude, Where's My Car? and family adventure movies, in other parts a person complaining that times used to be better, Good Luck is a movie you should see, even if just to support a director who still deserves to be a household name.
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Blake Williams has a B.A. in Film and Television Production from Ball State University. He aspires to one day be a director, but until that day comes you can find him at a showing of whatever's playing that day or at home alphabetizing a shelf of movies and games and muttering about how he should "slow down on spending."