Few Hollywood administrators deserve a second probability greater than Gore Verbinski. A man who had as a lot artistic success as he did within the first decade-plus of the 21st century (kicking off the J‑horror pattern along with his good remake of The Ring; raking in billions along with his imaginative Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy; profitable an Oscar for his debut animated function Vary) 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 unique work for studios. The medium can not afford to let such apparent expertise wither.
Relatively, 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 dangerous, every new scene extra misguided and worsening 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 evening, believing that some mixture of its patrons comprise the right workforce to hitch him on a mission to cease the upcoming beginning 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 properly over two hours lengthy and you’ll depend the profitable jokes on one hand.
The movie is structured round flashbacks displaying how every member of Rockwell’s workforce got here to the diner that evening. Every one performs like a rejected Black Mirror episode, filled with painfully apparent satirical broadsides at fashionable expertise. 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 2026it’s like watching a interval piece. Even its depiction of AI as a civilizational risk bears little particular resemblance to the expertise we’re coping with in the present day.
One thread involving a enterprise that makes clones of faculty taking pictures victims (who spew advertisements at cheaper price tiers) to consolation grieving dad and mom is chopping and unique. But even that reasonably robust idea will get misplaced amid a tidal wave of annoying cliches and hideous CGI monstrosities. The movie’s brutalizing parade of more and more zany pictures appears like an try to distract from the overall narrative collapse it experiences in its ultimate act – Good Luck, Have Enjoyable, Don’t Die may make a plot-hole nitpicker out of essentially 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.