Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
Director: Gore Verbinski
Writer: Matthew Robinson
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Juno Temple, Michael Pena
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is, like so many of director Gore Verbinski's best films, a movie that wastes absolutely no time. It can't. The future's on the line.
Verbsinski's latest directorial effort — premiered in a Secret Screening at September '25's Fantastic Fest — is a sci-fi comedy full of high-concept urgency and heart. The film dives headlong into its narrative, leaving the viewers just as much in the dark as everyone else in the film (save one unforgettable character), and that's part of its charm. There's a deliberate, freewheeling murkiness to its narrative in an age when too many sci-fi stories are explained to death before they've even gotten out of the blocks. When you add in a wonderful cast and a sense of humor that never lets up, you've got a great cinematic adventure on your hands.
The movie opens as a strangely dressed man (Sam Rockwell) arrives at a seemingly random diner in Los Angeles, proclaiming he's from the future. Once he's able to get enough people to listen to him, we learn the basic — often chaotic — rules of this particular time travel adventure. This man, you see, has come back in time from a future ravaged by AI dominance to pick a plucky band of fellow humans to prevent said future by stopping the AI right before it becomes self-aware. All he has to do is pick a few collaborators, get to the right place at the right time, and boom, he saves the world. The problem? He doesn't actually know which combination of diner patrons is the correct one, and he's never gotten far enough to know what to actually do when he ultimately confronts his artificial nemesis.
Fortunately, what he does have is volunteers: A grieving single mother (Juno Temple), a pair of frustrated schoolteachers (Zazie Beetz and Michael Pena), an oddball in a princess dress (Haley Lu Richardson), and other assorted misfits join his quest, setting off on a night they'll never forget … if they survive, anyway.
This strange nocturnal adventure, and all the threats it poses, unfolds almost in real time, as the gang runs through back alleys, parking garages, and neighborhoods to reach their ultimate goal. The rest of the time is built on flashbacks, as screenwriter Matthew Robinson takes us back to the lives of key members of the group before this night, what led them to the diner, and what their version of the present is really like. In this world, school shootings are treated as even more ghoulishly casual affairs, kids are literally worshipping their phones, and other deeply strange wounds to basic human interaction occur daily. So, for some people at least, it's easy to believe that a terrible future is coming.
There's a lot of Terminator flavor in the setup of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, but tonally the film has more in common with something like 12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's gritty, wild sci-fi romp through a chance to prevent another dark future. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is certainly sunnier than that particular film, but it plays with the same madcap energy, particularly thanks to Rockwell, who plays Madman From the Future with an ease akin to breathing. He just gets it, and because he immediately takes command of the stage in the opening scene, there's very little time to stop and wonder if this is all worth it. He simply commands your attention.
Pull back a bit, and you'll of course find some flaws in the film's anarchic procession of events. The film's third act, while satisfying, definitely struggles with finding a sense of cohesion. The same can be said for its flashbacks, which focus on some characters but not others, giving us clues as to who lives and dies as well as a sense of something being off-balance in the ensemble. It's all buried under comedy that works and a sense that we're not ever meant to make complete sense of every single action (this is not one of those logic-puzzle sci-fi films), but the issues are there, and they drag the film down just enough to keep it out of masterpiece territory.
But that does nothing to diminish the sheer entertainment value of Verbinski's film. It simply crackles with a messy energy, a sense that the only way anything of value gets done anymore is if a small group of people just step up and decide to take the job. In the world of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, saving the future of humanity is sloppy business. It arrives haphazardly, like inspiration or love or the sudden urge to dance. That makes this a thoroughly entertaining film full of great moments, but look deeper and you'll see wisdom in it, too. Fighting for the future is messy and confusing and scary because humanity itself is also all of those things. It's a film that not only depicts that feeling with honesty, but a film that asks us to consider that perhaps the hot mess of our world is worth saving simply because the mess is, in its own way, quite beautiful. That makes the film a work of rare grace and earnest wonder, and an early contender as one of the best films of 2026.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die hits theaters January 30, 2026.
