When it comes to how Hollywood has handled A.I., at least when it comes to movie plots, it’s weird. The last two Mission: Impossible movies featured an evil AI that was out to steal all the nuclear weapons and take over the world, but a lot of other films have decided to declare A.I. benevolent, if not outright great. The recent Chris Pratt action vehicle Mercy, after spending two hours hyping up A.I. as the centerpiece of a Kafkaesque nightmare, pivoted at the end to declaring that whether human or artificial, “nobody’s perfect.”
The new film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die doesn’t do anything like that; in fact, its handling of A.I. is one of its less objectionable elements. The issue is that the film is overstuffed, with a convoluted structure, which begins with a dynamite premise and spends the next two hours squandering it.
The setup is that a strange man with the appearance of a street vagrant (Sam Rockwell) materializes one night in a Los Angeles diner, informing the assembled customers that he’s from the future and needs their help on a special mission to stop the dystopian future. The diners include a married pair of teachers (Michael Pena and Zazie Beetz), a young woman (Haley Lu Richardson) who’s “allergic to technology,” a mother (Juno Temple) who suffered a tragedy, and a few others who don’t make much of an impression.
The group has a series of adventures, occasionally interrupted by flashbacks that fill in their backstories. Throughout, Rockwell’s character frequently says he’s had the Groundhog Day-style ability to live out this scenario dozens of times before, and knows what to expect at each turn.
It doesn’t all work. It grabs ideas from better films, such as Groundhog Day and The Matrix. One of the backstories, about the aftermath of a school shooting, is in poor taste, and overwhelms the stakes of the rest of the plot. And the third act is especially convoluted. When it comes to the A.I., the ultimate goal isn’t so much to destroy it, but rather to download safety protocols to it.
Some of the performances are decent, starting with Rockwell, who makes the most of a rare leading role, and Richardson, who made such an impression in one of the White Lotus seasons. I wish they’d been in the service of a better movie.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was directed by Gore Verbinski, who’s been associated with blockbusters such as the Pirates of the Caribbean series, although this is his first film in more than a decade. Unfortunately, it can’t make the most of a handful of good ideas.