Few Hollywood directors deserve a second chance more than Gore Verbinski. A man who had as much creative success as he did in the first decade-plus of the 21st century (kicking off the J‑horror trend with his brilliant remake of The Ring; raking in billions with his imaginative Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy; winning an Oscar for his debut animated feature Rango) did not deserve to spend nearly a decade unemployed due to a couple of high-profile flops. It’s a sign of a healthy film culture to have a filmmaker like Verbinski doing original work for studios. The medium cannot afford to let such obvious talent wither.
Rather, that’s what seemed to be true for the past nine years. Verbinski withered in director’s jail for nearly a decade. His comeback film should be considered a parole violation. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is gobsmackingly bad, each new scene more misguided and irritating than the last. The film begins with an unnamed man (Sam Rockwell, bored and exhausted) bursting into a Los Angeles diner, claiming to have traveled back in time from a dystopian future. He’s made dozens of trips to this particular diner on this particular night, believing that some combination of its patrons comprise the perfect team to join him on a mission to stop the imminent birth of a world-ending AI. We learn the details in a torturously long monologue that establishes the film’s tone: Annoyingly smarmy, toothlessly farcical, undeservingly smug. The film is well over two hours long and you can count the successful jokes on one hand.
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The film is structured around flashbacks showing how each member of Rockwell’s team came to the diner that night. Each one plays like a rejected Black Mirror episode, full of painfully obvious satirical broadsides at modern technology. The first segment features Michael Peña as a schoolteacher whose students are turned into zombies by their smartphones. How topical! Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die spends most of its punishing 135 minute runtime on similarly hacky material – such attempts to capture the zeitgeist regarding tech and social media would have felt dated years ago. In 2026, it’s like watching a period piece. Even its depiction of AI as a civilizational threat bears little specific resemblance to the technology we’re dealing with today.
One thread involving a business that makes clones of school shooting victims (who spew ads at lower price tiers) to comfort grieving parents is cutting and original. Yet even that moderately strong concept gets lost amid a tidal wave of exasperating cliches and hideous CGI monstrosities. The film’s brutalizing parade of increasingly zany images feels like an attempt to distract from the total narrative collapse it experiences in its final act – Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die could make a plot-hole nitpicker out of the most committed formalist. This numbing, relentless barrage of meaningless nonsense feels, more than anything else, like a TikTok doom scroll. Now that’s topical.