Rob Reviews "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die"

Gore Verbinski is a strange dude.  And so is Matthew Robinson.  This combination of director and writer (respectively) craziness is responsible for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

In a film that is like Edge of Tomorrow (which makes sense since Robinson is writing that film’s follow-up) meets Brazil (thanks to Mark Walters for helping my brain get to that one) and so much more, Sam Rockwell plays an unnamed man who enters a diner with a bomb strapped to his body, claiming to be from the future where everything goes to pot unless he can fulfill a mission he has been sent back to fulfill.  Choosing a group of people in the diner to help him, the race is on to protect our world from sure disaster.

And that’s about how far I can go with this one without spoiling anything.  Because there is A LOT going on here.

The cast here is SOLID, featuring people like Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Pena, Zazie Beetz, and Juno Temple that turns this into a borderline ensemble even though this really is Rockwell’s character’s story.  There is a bit of time-hopping that gives some great background into some of the characters that works well to help understand why the chaos is what it is from a number of different angles, but not for all of them, which I go back and forth on the value of.  On one hand, I would have like to have known more about all of them good, bad, or indifferent while on the other I think to myself that this thing was already almost two and a half hours so maybe that is not a bad thing.

The mix of action, mystery, comedy, and violence works a balance that we have seen Verbinski utilize before with his work in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and his cast is able to take his vision and run with it.  The script itself gives just enough away at a time to not really give away the endgame while keeping me engaged in the present, which can also be a delicate balance.  Even the gore that was there was not enough for me to wonder why I chose this film to screen due to my aversion of horror films, and what was used added to even the comedy at a couple of points.

I am truly trying to dance on a tightrope here so as not to give anything away that the trailer (that is BRILLIANTLY put together after seeing the film with edits that look like they belong together but are nowhere near each other in the final product) does, but also understand that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is not going to be for everyone.  It takes that offbeat kind of sense of humor to truly appreciate this kind of film, but I would not direct anyone else away from it.  Just understand what you are getting into when you get into it.