It’s been a while since we last saw Gore Verbinski. Definitely an idiosyncratic stylist, he found himself a real niche in the early 2000s with weird genre work like The Ring or the underappreciated The Mexican, before graduating to increasingly busy and expensive tentpole fare like the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy — and all of that before cratering with the equally bonkers but audience-rejected The Lone Ranger. But following that singular aughts course, he left feature filmmaking for a decade. Until now! Yes, he’s back with the ostentatiously titled Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a characteristically overstuffed and ambitious sci-fi hodgepodge that nonetheless features a lot of Verbinski’s formal chops and eye for design.
Late at night, at a greasy spoon diner, a crowd of patrons is loudly interrupted by someone listed in the credits only as The Man From The Future (Sam Rockwell). He’s dressed bizarrely and won’t stop ranting about how he needs to recruit several of the diners for his efforts to save the world from certain doom after the birth of a world-breaking AI, emphasizing that he’s done this hundreds of times before without success and that most, if not all, of them will die in the process. This time he settles on a group of folks that includes Susan (Juno Temple), whose son was recently killed in a school shooting, goth chick Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a teacher couple, Mark and Janet (Michael Pena and Zazie Beetz, respectively), and a couple others. And, well, off we go.
Good Luck’s story structure involves a lot of layered flashbacks that fill in the blanks about both our band of heroes and the world they inhabit, but in execution these are all less illuminating than they are confoundingly odd. Susan’s dead child has been “resurrected” as an digital construct that she communicates with via earpiece, for example. This leads to the quick realization that most of the population has already been mentally captured by the villainous AI at the center of all of this, but literally nobody talks about it — initially anyway, which means it feels like the world we’re entering doesn’t really resemble anything recognizable to begin with. It’s a gamble of narrative structure that doesn’t really pay off; there’s no baseline here to be worried about since the entire thing is so consistently out of whack. It’s also full of little narrative curlicues and endless slapstick endeavors that eventually wear thin. By the time the climax arrives, you may just be excited for it to finally wrap up (spoiler alert: it does not). Fans of Douglas Adams, however, will find both the path and the endgame pretty endlessly funny.
For the rest of viewers, there’s still solace to be found in the performances, which are uniformly solid in selling the gonzo material — and Rockwell, of course, proves to be the standout. That’s not to say he’s pushing any of his own boundaries here, but it remains as delightful as ever to watch him bounce off the walls and basically just do his coked-up shtick. But the real — and sure to be underrated — focus of the film is Verbinski’s eye for composition and design. Here he’s deploying a production aesthetic that blends a recognizable everyday setting with something close to Terry Gilliam’s cluttered, busy futurism (think 12 Monkeys or Brazil), and he shoots it all with careful deliberation. Compositions are framed with consistently perfect balance, even when they’re packed with too much detail to immediately clock. Which is to say, it’s nice to have a natural talent like Verbinksi back behind the camera, even if the result is imperfect. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die certainly is, but If Terry Gilliam and Douglas Adams making a Black Mirror episode sounds good to you, then by all means: go with God.
DIRECTOR: Gore Verbinski; CAST: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz; DISTRIBUTOR: Briarcliff Entertainment; IN THEATERS: February 13; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 13 min.
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