Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die Review
This review is based on a screening which took place at the 2025 Fantastic Fest Film Festival. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die will receive a theatrical release in the United States on January 30, 2026.
The Terminator franchise really had us believing the AI apocalypse would be far more interesting than it probably will be; there aren't Skynet bots starting cyberwars, just brain-rotten social media algorithms that repress our critical thinking skills. Gore Verbinski's Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is a much more realistic take on AI's apocalyptic implications, albeit via a zany adventure involving time travelers and mystical creatures. Matthew Robinson's outside-the-box science fiction screenplay is a whole lot of fun, even considering its bleak commentary on artificial intelligence; however, what it so saliently says about our current society's technology fixation should chill you to the bone.
Sam Rockwell is fantastic as the film's bonkers lead, either a conspiracy crackpot dressed like a junkyard astronaut or a hero sent from the future. His mission is simple: to install safety programming into an artificial intelligence model currently being built by a 9-year-old genius. To do so, he must recruit a random assortment of strangers eating inside a Norm's Diner in Los Angeles to become his superteam…but he doesn't know precisely who. He's endured 117 failed attempts, each time with a different configuration of patrons. Hopefully, the roster of a techno-allergic princess (Haley Lu Richardson), a heartbroken mother who lost her son to gun violence (Juno Temple), and two teachers who are being hunted by their students (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) can finally save our future Earth.
There's a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quality about Rockwell's performance, playing an exhausted and somewhat perturbed team leader caught in his own Groundhog Day time loop. He's effortlessly charming and immediately grabs our attention when bursting into the diner. There's an enthralling bluntness as he tries to convince Boy Scout leaders and frat boys to join his adventure while recounting failed attempts where diners have perished (hilariously calling one man as useless as an albatross). It's the perfect role for Rockwell, allowing him to be confident, snarky, and gleefully unhinged with a smile. He's either civilization’s savior wrapped in plastic sheets and rubber tubs, or the most convincing, unkempt vagrant this side of Skid Row, and that looming question helps keep us on edge.
However, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die isn't a linear story. We cut back to vignettes that reveal the backstory of each primary character accompanying Rockwell, which periodically stunts momentum and becomes the film's biggest problem. Switching between pre-diner and post-diner timelines can be daunting, but this is also where Robinson's script levels its darkest commentaries and pummels us in the gut. Verbinski strives to make Rockwell's time-hopping weirdo seem like the strange outlier in modern America, when the country has already devolved into a wi-fi-powered prison. Humans have been turned into content-munching zombies by smartphones and virtual reality headsets, school shootings are as regular as coffee breaks, and the American government and Silicon Valley billionaires alike have found ways to profit off all of it while we're all glued to screens. It's so immeasurably dark, but it represents the closest simulation of a believable AI apocalypse that we've seen.
Verbinski's direction and Robinson's words are so painfully direct, but also approach the whole AI debate from a valuable angle; AI isn't just inevitable, it's here. Rockwell isn't trying to blow a small child and his supercomputer to smithereens, he's just trying to enforce proper regulations. For as peculiar and grandiose as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die can become, it's speaking to the core of rational AI usage with both urgency and tact. Despite Rockwell's appearance being that of the person in Times Square with an "The End Is Nigh" sign, Verbinski's film is hardly the ramblings of a lunatic. It's empathetic enough to urge a better tomorrow, while still leveling ample servings of devastation and paranoia about the world as it exists today.
That said, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is entertaining in its AI satires. Peña and Beetz dare interrupt their students' screentime and are forced to use homemade Mars Attacks! "guns" to "brick" devices. Temple falls down a rabbit hole of despair and finds herself in an Apple Store-like facility that "helps" parents of school shooting victims (an agonizing farce that works too well). Then there's Richardson, the children's party host who gets nosebleeds around any form of technology. It's all so delightfully bizarre while making easily digestible points, all formed around the false promise of AI-driven kingdoms that do their best to offer us "perfection." Yet, it's all just slightly askew lies based on "shitty prompts," as the group finds out when eventually fighting off waves of AI-generated enemies, the largest of which is a visual showstopper.
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