My Cultural Diet

The patrons at Norms diner are just looking to enjoy a quiet evening when they’re interrupted by a strangely dressed and deranged-looking man who claims to be from the future. Oh, and he also has a bomb. After assembling a ragtag group of hostages and volunteers, the man sets off on a journey through Los Angeles to find a nine-year-old boy and stop him from creating the AI that will destroy humanity. It’s a wild premise that’s certainly rooted in modern concerns over the emergence of AI, concerns that I’ve written about here on Opus. And to his credit, Gore Verbinski did manage to convict me about my own smartphone usage. As a film, though, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a bit of a mess that requires far too much suspension of disbelief, even for a film that features AI-generated cat centaurs spraying glitter from their genitals. Verbinski clearly wanted to create a darkly surreal satire à la Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, right down to the final, heart-breaking twist. There are parts of the satire that do work. The film depicts an America where school shootings are so common that, rather than try and fix the problem, the government simply subsidizes the cloning and re-cloning of dead kids, and I found the plight of the woman who’s allergic to Wifi (shades of Todd Haynes’ Safe) quite affecting. But the comedy is too broad (sadly, Sam Rockwell is wasted here) and I spent too much of the film rolling my eyes at how didactic and heavy-handed it felt.

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