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Despite directing a phenomenally successful franchise starter (Pirates of the Caribbean), two of its sequels (Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End), a smash-hit horror remake (The Ring), an Oscar-winning animation (Rango), and films starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts (The Mexican) and Nicolas Cage and Michael Caine (The Weather Man), Gore Verbinski never quite broke through as a name the average cinemagoer would instantly recognise. There are some through-lines in his work – a dark sense of humour, an ease with pushing megastars past their limits – but he was mostly there in service of something or someone else, whether it be IP or an A-lister.
After both consumed him in 2013’s loathed flop The Lone Ranger, Verbinski went away and returned three years later with an extravagant “one for me”, the ambitious throwback horror A Cure for Wellness. I ultimately admired what he was trying to do (a gothic, exquisitely crafted original chiller with a real budget) more than what he actually achieved, and with another box-office disappointment under his belt, he disappeared again. A longer wait of almost a decade followed, and now he’s back with an even bigger swing, the sci-fi comedy adventure Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
The swing was, in fact, so big that it was made independently and then picked up by Briarcliff, a company mostly known for buying films others won’t touch, whether that be down to content (Trump drama The Apprentice), off-screen controversy (Jonathan Majors’ vehicle Magazine Dreams) or quality (Benedict Cumberbatch dud The Thing With Feathers). It’s not that the film doesn’t have commercial elements – big action set pieces, a recognisable cast, what appears to be a decent budget – it’s just packaged in a way that makes it more of an outlier in 2026, in ways that both work and don’t. Like A Cure for Wellness, it’s a thing of specific personality and impressive craft, but like that film it’s also cursed with an ungainly length (134 minutes to A Cure’s 147) and a frustrating lack of restraint.
It’s a definite step up, though, a more complete idea of the kind of film Verbinski would be making if the industry truly let him (the past few years have seen him try, and so far fail, to get a number of projects off the ground, including animated adventure Cattywampus and a George RR Martin adaptation). It starts with an unoriginal yet immediately involving attention-grabber: a man walks into a diner claiming he’s from the future. The man is played by a manic Sam Rockwell, and he warns of a future where smartphone dependency has led to societal collapse and artificial intelligence has gained full control. He needs volunteers to help him track down the source and steer it in a better direction, a quest he’s tried multiple times before without success, but, with the future of humanity on his shoulders, one he must keep trying and trying again.
It’s the old Terminator 2 setup updated with elements of Black Mirror, The Mitchells vs the Machines, The Matrix, Wall-E and, shudder, Y2K with a dash of Everything Everywhere’s gonzo maximalism (for a film positioning itself as a wild new vision, it’s all rather familiar). It’s a lot and it’s supposed to be – flashbacks, flashforwards, just general flashes – but it’s surprising how much actually sticks, given how nauseating the very worst version of this cocktail could have been. That’s partly because of the film’s timely hatred of all things AI (Verbinski’s press tour has also been pleasingly sour towards it) and how it uses the corrosive consequences of living our lives out on a phone screen as the lead-in to an apocalyptic nightmare, all awfully relatable at this particularly awful moment. Once Rockwell’s leader picks his ensemble (including Juno Temple, Zazie Beetz, Haley Lu Richardson and Michael Peña), screenwriter Matthew Robinson gives the prominent characters each a vignette to show how tech had been negatively affecting them, from a teacher struggling with a classroom of TikTok addicts to a mother transferring her dead son’s consciousness into a clone. They all take us to far more interesting places than the more run-of-the-mill quest we keep returning to.
The jumping around can leave us a little too dizzy, especially when added to the madcap, anything-goes rules of the enemy, which brings forth pig-masked goons, toys brought to life and, most unsuccessfully, a human-eating giant cat creature. The up-to-11 excess, when megaphoned to us at such a hefty run time (one feels like a limited series could have worked better), can take away from the smaller, smarter observations and more human moments that work better, the sadness of what tech has already taken away and the fear over what else is to come. Rockwell, whose performances sometimes need a reining-in that isn’t always on show elsewhere here, manages to keep things just about on the right side, more energised than annoying, while, as is often the case, Richardson is a standout, adding texture to her frowny tech-allergic purist who might be the key to everything.
Even if much of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in need of a rethink, it’s hard not to enjoy the scrappy, animated brainstorm taking place in front of us. The mess of it all is at least a very human one.
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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is out in the US and Australia on 13 February and in the UK on 20 February
