Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die: Groundhog Day Meets The Terminator by Way of The Dirty Dozen

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

The amusingly named Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die plays out as though someone swiped a few dog-eared scripts from the Black Mirror slush pile, bolted them onto a star vehicle, and then put Sam Rockwell in the driver’s seat. It’s energetic, bonkers, and very funny. It’s also two-and-a-quarter hours long, and I didn’t begrudge it a single minute.

That’s in part because several of the characters have some pretty well-developed back stories. Janet and Mark (Zazie Beetz, Michael Pena) are high-school teachers whose colleagues are so burnt out that when news goes around that one of them is on sabbatical for reasons of stress, all the others can say is, “That lucky bastard.”

Susan (Juno Temple) is a single mom grieving the loss of her son in a school shooting. She’s thrown into a support group of Stepford Parents who partake of a secret government program that clones their dead children to biological perfection but somewhat wanting in the personality department.

Then there’s Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is allergic to cellphones and Wi-Fi. As someone notes in the film, might as well be sensitive to the air.

What they have in common is the coincidence of all being in the same diner when Sam Rockwell walks in. Listed in the credits only as The Man from the Future, he looks deranged and homeless as he barks at the startled customers that their future is on the cusp of disaster, and only they can save it.

Or rather, only some of them can. Sam, as we might as well call him, tells them he’s been to the same diner on the same night 117 times, and the night never ends well. But he’s certain (don’t ask why) that among the coffee-drinkers and pie-snarfers is the perfect group of heroes. Imagine if Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day had to put together The Dirty Dozen.

And so, Sam grabs the above group plus a couple of spares and heads off to save the world. They are rescuing it from the coming of AI, which is one of two existential threats in modern movies, the other being climate change. Never thought I’d say this, but I miss global thermonuclear war.

There’s more than a little of The Terminator in the script by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters), but there’s also a propulsive, ticking-clock energy in the way director Gore Verbinski shoots it. (Sam wears an actual ticking clock on his wrist as a reminder.)

And there’s a slather of dark comedy over everything, like the shot of a guy who’s been stabbed in the head with a meat thermometer. It reads a perfect 98.6 F. Or Sam’s retort when someone comments on his homeless guy looks: “I come from an apocalypse. This is the height of apocalypse chic!”

I won’t reveal any more, except to say that Robinson and Verbinski have uneven filmographies. The director’s last film was 2016’s A Cure for Wellness (execrable) and he made The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp as a Comanche. But hey, he also helmed 2005’s The Weather Man (excellent) and the three best Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which is to say the first three.

Robinson, meanwhile, got his start with The Invention of Lying, a terrible Ricky Gervais project from 2009. He also worked on 2016’s Monster Trucks. (It sucked.)

But those were co-writing credits. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is all his own, and with Verbinski, and Rockwell’s apocalyptic energy, he’s part of the perfect team. They may not be saving the world, but they can save your next cinema outing from drudgery. Have fun! Oh, and good luck, and don’t, y’know.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Directed by Gore Verbinski. Starring Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, and Juno Temple. In Theatres February 13.