{"id":433946,"date":"2026-02-19T10:22:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T10:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/433946\/"},"modified":"2026-02-19T10:22:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T10:22:08","slug":"good-luck-have-fun-dont-die-review-an-ai-satire-thats-the-work-of-a-very-angry-filmmaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/433946\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don\u2019t Die review \u2013 An AI satire that\u2019s the work of a very angry filmmaker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The value of imagination \u2013 the real, human stuff AI could never hope to touch<\/a> \u2013 has been put to the test with Gore Verbinski<\/a>\u2019s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don\u2019t Die. It\u2019s ideologically flawed, structurally jumbled, and a little too enamoured by its dystopian predecessors (shades of Terminator and Edge of Tomorrow here). But it\u2019s also sort of wonderfully personal, cranky and spiked \u2013 like an affronted hedgehog trying to repeatedly ram your shin.<\/p>\n

A cat-adjacent monster appears at one point, and its design is so silly and aggressively uncool that I found myself warmly affectionate towards it. Filmmaking is so hyperconscious now. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don\u2019t Die is a throwback to when mainstream artists would dare to throw a few ideas at the wall and see what sticks. <\/p>\n

Sam Rockwell<\/a>, playing an unnamed time traveller in a plastic raincoat, turns up to a diner to lecture its customers about how their excessive social media use has robbed them of their dignity. In the future, he warns, half the population die while the other half are too busy doomscrolling in bed to notice. This is his 118th attempt to pervert that course, if only the right people would volunteer for his righteous crusade.<\/p>\n

Cut to: a bunch of recognisable faces, among them Zazie Beetz and Michael Pe\u00f1a as Mark and Janet, married teachers; Juno Temple<\/a> as Susan, a grieving mother; Asim Chaudhry as uber driver Scott; and Haley Lu Richardson as Ingrid, who was born allergic to electronic devices and wifi.<\/p>\n

Verbinski is largely associated with his big-budget successes (three Pirates of the Caribbean films) and one big-budget failure (2013\u2019s The Lone Ranger). But there\u2019s more here than franchise work and studio-friendly competency \u2013 there\u2019s the darker, more idiosyncratic streak that once saw him open the third Pirates film with a mass execution sequence, ending on the death of a small boy. His most recent movie, 2016\u2019s A Cure for Wellness (2016), was a thrillingly confounding Gothic delirium appropriately headlined by Mia Goth.<\/p>\n

\"JunoJuno Temple, Michael Pe\u00f1a, Sam Rockwell and Zazie Beetz in \u2018Good Luck, Have Fun, Don\u2019t Die\u2019 (Entertainment in Film)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all your fault, you\u2019re equally complicit,\u201d the time traveller howls, like a man in a comment section, and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don\u2019t Die regrettably carries over his interest only in the symptoms, never the causes. No one\u2019s finger ever actually bothers to point towards the corporations who started all this. Matthew Robinson\u2019s script haphazardly starts to dish out backstories for some of these characters (Scott, notably, is left out), and we see Mark and Janet battle through a zombie horde of teens, their features ghoulishly lit by their phone screens. <\/p>\n

Still, there\u2019s some genuine venom in Verbinski\u2019s approach, and these vignettes arguably feel more potent than the average Black Mirror episode because the focus isn\u2019t on impressing cleverness on the audience. Instead they release a little of the filmmaker\u2019s pent-up frustration. Characters speak in the eerily chipper patter of the Stepford Wives. Police happily gun down hostage victims. A company clones the child victims of school shootings for a tidy fee (there\u2019s a discounted version with ads). The latter is so bleak and mean that it feels genuinely provocative in a way few modern satires dare.<\/p>\n

That may, understandably, turn some audiences away, especially when it\u2019s been paired with Rockwell\u2019s typical ping pong ball charm. But, as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don\u2019t Die gets weirder and weirder, it only further provides the evidence of its own thesis. As the time traveller warns, \u201cAI is going to try to give you everything you ever wanted\u2026 but in the end it\u2019s all a lie.\u201d You can call this one messy, but at least it\u2019s honest.<\/p>\n

Dir: Gore Verbinski. Starring: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Pe\u00f1a, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Juno Temple. Cert 15, 134 minutes.<\/p>\n

\u2018Good Luck, Have Fun, Don\u2019t Die\u2019 is in cinemas from 20 February<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-433946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}