Thoughts on Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

     On Hulu I watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, a 2025 sci-fi comedy directed by Gore Verbinski and written by Matthew Robinson. It was decent, but overly long at two hours and 15 minutes, it should've been a tight 90 minutes. It did get hamfisted with the "everyone's on their phones" stuff, but I liked the basic premise of Sam Rockwell as a time traveler from the future who is trying to prevent AI from taking over the world, and he has time-traveled to the same Norm's diner in L.A. 117 times to find the right combination of patrons in the diner to join him on his quest to stop the AI apocalypse from happening. It's like Terminator 2 if it was more of a goofy comedy and less about Sarah Connor trying to kill the creator of Skynet in front of his family.

    The film has a good cast with Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, Zazie Beetz, and Michael Peña as some of the diner patrons picked for the mission, with their own backstories told in flashback about their experiences with technology and AI, and the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network described their backstories as being in their own Black Mirror episodes. Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña play a teacher couple whose students are always on their phones in class and ignore the teachers; Juno Temple plays a woman whose teen son dies in a school shooting and other mothers of school shooting victims lead her to a place where they can clone her son, albeit more like a physical copy than having his same personality; and Haley Lu Richardson plays a woman who is allergic to cell phones and WiFi and gets nosebleeds around them, and her boyfriend, who once was against cell phones, gets addicted to a VR headset and wants to live in virtual reality than the real world. Their stories are all pretty interesting, especially the one with Juno Temple's character, and I did prefer their backstories to the main plot thread, which feels like too many plot ideas thrown in at once.