Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die review: Clever, infectious and wildly original – AI be damned

If you only watch one movie this year featuring a CGI centaur with a cat’s head, that sprays glittery confetti from its undercarriage, then make it this one. Gore Verbinski’s hog-wild time travel tale is audacious, fresh and a massive amount of fun, even though it falls over in a confusing final act.

Sam Rockwell has a blast as the unnamed revolutionary from the future trying to save the world from a nine-year-old child who is destined to invent a God-like AI that hates humans.

To do so he must recruit a team of random strangers who happen to be eating at Norm’s diner on a particular night – the time traveller has tried multiple combinations before only to be thwarted by some outrageous obstacle each time. Could this bunch be the right one? What’s certain is they won’t all make it to the end.

Good Luck is at its strongest in its first two thirds, where vignettes showing the backstories of some of the diners are intercut with the overarching mission. These play like micro episodes of Black Mirror, mixing dark humour with tech-terror.

Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña are school teachers, menaced by teen zombies mobilised by their phones. The White Lotus star Haley Lu Richardson is a professional princess for children’s birthday parties who is allergic to cell phones and wi-fi. And in the very best one, Juno Temple’s bereaved mother is given the chance to reunite with her son who has been killed in a school shooting, via a cloning programme.

This segment is genuinely sad and very troubling in terms of what America looks like now but also laugh-out-loud funny as she is asked to choose her resurrected son’s traits via the film’s equivalent of an Apple Store.

Temple carries this segment with absolute commitment – she feels like a real person dealing with real trauma amidst a Stepford Wives-esque nightmare of hollow-eyed parents, many of whom have resurrected their massacred children multiple times. And to reiterate: it’s genuinely funny.

Though Good Luck is horror/sci-fi/action/comedy, there’s certainly an underlying scream of frustration in the script, written by Matthew Robinson, who’s best known as the writer/director of Ricky Gervais comedy The Invention of Lying.

The apocalypse is coming. It’s already started. No one cares and no one is doing anything about it. Kids are all morons in thrall to their phones. Adults are numbed to stupefaction by the horrors of the world. Attention spans are microscopic, and any creativity is being replaced by AI slop.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die enjoys playing with very meta elements of this, although that’s also where it ties itself in knots. For a film concerned with short attention spans it’s really long at 134 minutes. It also covers up some of its less coherent plot points by essentially jangling its keys at the audience via tech jargon and flashy CGI.

Parts of the final act even feel like it’s playing with what a film would look like were it written by Chat GPT – a bold idea if not entirely successful.

The final act trips over its own shoelaces, with several too many endings and some questionable logic. Like Verbinski’s latter two Pirates of the Caribbean movies and 2016’s A Cure for Wellness, it looks fantastic but doesn't entirely make sense by the end.

Good Luck will draw comparisons to 2022’s Everything, Everywhere All at Once, though this film is unlikely to be bothering any mainstream awards ceremonies. In a way it’s all the better for it – it’s clever, unpretentious and packed with infectious energy. Crucially too, it’s wildly original – AI be damned!

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is released in UK cinemas on Friday 20 February 2026.

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