Mike sent me the trailer to Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die a couple of months ago. Zak praised Sam Rockwell's performance in Three Billboards just this past weekend, then Ben sent along a video of Rockwell dancing for 14 minutes that had me transfixed. Faced with having to use one last vacation day before the end of February, all of these things came together and I knew that I had to go on my...
1st Cinema Outing of 2026.
An 11:45am showing at the local Regal.
I didn't notice it until last year, but it just seems to be common practice now films to not start at their advertised time. Now, of course, I've known for my entire lifetime that films don't start at their advertised start time. But I knew that the trailers always started at the advertised start time. Some time post-Covid, maybe as recent as last year, but maybe for a few years, the pre-show pre-trailer ads just keep going past the start time. What's worse, this time, even after the trailers started, there were ads between trailers.
So, that part sucked.
The good part was that I had the entire theater to myself, a giant tub of popcorn, a massive soda pop, and nothing to do for 2.5 hours but watch a stupid movie.
Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die is a stupid movie, but it knows it's a stupid movie, which makes the difference. The closest thing that I can compare it to in recent experience is Tulsa King, a very watchable show starring Sly Stallone as an elderly ex-convict just released from jail and trying to get back in the game in the midst of a new world full of gadgets and goo-haws that he just can't understand. In that show, the jokes are all obvious and one-note, written for the show's target "Boomer" audience. And it was at least a little bit refreshing to me because it didn't try to be cool at all. It was embarrassing and knew it and didn't apologize. That's kind of how I feel about GLHFDD (which I will now use exclusively to refer to the film). The cultural "commentary" is anti-subtle. I mean that it actively resists any attempt at nuance. It's all surface text and deliberately obvious.
It's a mash-up of so many prior influences. Give me a Terminator base, a healthy dash of 12 Monkeys mixed in with some Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, and a blend of The 13th Floor and The Matrix, but make sure you stir them all together in front of that Johnny Depp AI movie Transcendence to get the proportions just right. And a dozen other films. This film is in conversation with them all.
And when it's on, it's on. Mostly when Sam Rockwell is on the screen, the movie works. He's effortlessly charming as the aggressive homeless guerrilla warrior from the future. When he's not on the screen, it's usually because the film has gone into flashback mode, presenting a series (three in total, I think) of rejected Black Mirror episodes as back stories for the side characters. I thought that each of these flashbacks was weak and the addition of these backstories messed with the pacing of the film.
There are a couple of twists in the film, but if I can guess your twists in the first third of the film, then they're probably not really twists at all.
But I think that the GLHFDD's misstep is that in the end, it settles for being clever instead of continuing in its megaphone voice that DIGITAL REALITY IS NOT REALITY AND GETS IN THE WAY OF REAL REAL REALITY. It's like Verbinski and crew didn't really believe it after all, it was just something they had to say because everyone's concerned about being connected to the Internet all the time, but no one wants to actually, you know, disconnect.
I also don't think that the film coheres into a timeline/reality that makes sense, but it's harder to talk about that without getting very specific and into spoiler territory. At the end of the film, I was disappointed in the film's failure to land its main themes and, as a long-time Science Fiction fan, I was disappointed by its use of time travel and virtual reality tropes. And like all of those stupid Black Mirror episodes that it was mimicking, its real purpose just seems to get us to cozy up with a dark dystopia as just another entertainment option to send each other messages about on our phones.