Few Hollywood administrators deserve a second probability greater than Gore Verbinski. A man who had as a lot creative success as he did within the first decade-plus of the 21st century (kicking off the J‑horror pattern along with his sensible remake of The Ring; raking in billions along with his imaginative Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy; successful an Oscar for his debut animated function Rango) didn’t need to spend almost a decade unemployed because of a couple of high-profile flops. It’s a signal of a wholesome movie tradition to have a filmmaker like Verbinski doing authentic work for studios. The medium can not afford to let such apparent expertise wither.
Somewhat, that’s what gave the impression to be true for the previous 9 years. Verbinski withered in director’s jail for almost a decade. His comeback movie ought to be thought of a parole violation. Good Luck, Have Enjoyable, Don’t Die is gobsmackingly unhealthy, every new scene extra misguided and aggravating than the final. The movie begins with an unnamed man (Sam Rockwell, bored and exhausted) bursting right into a Los Angeles diner, claiming to have traveled again in time from a dystopian future. He’s made dozens of journeys to this explicit diner on this explicit night time, believing that some mixture of its patrons comprise the right crew to hitch him on a mission to cease the upcoming delivery of a world-ending AI. We study the small print in a torturously lengthy monologue that establishes the movie’s tone: Annoyingly smarmy, toothlessly farcical, undeservingly smug. The movie is nicely over two hours lengthy and you’ll rely the profitable jokes on one hand.
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The movie is structured round flashbacks displaying how every member of Rockwell’s crew got here to the diner that night time. Each performs like a rejected Black Mirror episode, stuffed with painfully apparent satirical broadsides at fashionable know-how. The primary phase options Michael Peña as a schoolteacher whose college students are was zombies by their smartphones. How topical! Good Luck, Have Enjoyable, Don’t Die spends most of its punishing 135 minute runtime on equally hacky materials – such makes an attempt to seize the zeitgeist relating to tech and social media would have felt dated years in the past. In 2026, it’s like watching a interval piece. Even its depiction of AI as a civilizational menace bears little particular resemblance to the know-how we’re coping with as we speak.
One thread involving a enterprise that makes clones of college capturing victims (who spew adverts at lower cost tiers) to consolation grieving dad and mom is reducing and authentic. But even that reasonably robust idea will get misplaced amid a tidal wave of frustrating cliches and hideous CGI monstrosities. The movie’s brutalizing parade of more and more zany photos seems like an try and distract from the entire narrative collapse it experiences in its closing act – Good Luck, Have Enjoyable, Don’t Die may make a plot-hole nitpicker out of probably the most dedicated formalist. This numbing, relentless barrage of meaningless nonsense feels, greater than the rest, like a TikTok doom scroll. Now that’s topical.
