Inside a diner in Los Angeles, customers scroll through their phones as coffee is poured, burger patties are flipped, food is plated and a selection of condiments is dramatically lit.
Ultimately, in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” the well-meaning but disappointing first film in a handful of years from “The Ring” director Gore Verbinski, it’s the phones that are important.
A hooded man (Sam Rockwell) enters the diner, announcing that he’s from the future, he’s strapped with explosives and, just as he’s done 116 times before this, he’s come to recruit a few of the patrons for an all-important mission — to alter an artificial intelligence that has made his time “a nightmare apocalypse.”
Rockwell (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “Jojo Rabbit”) is terrific in this extended sequence, as he illustrates that he’s met all these folks before, that he’s still trying to find the right combination that will lead to a successful outcome and that, if anyone tries to leave, he’ll blow them all up.
It all started with the phones, he says of the coming mess, folks turning the first few minutes of the day in bed with their devices into all-day affairs, resulting in a population that can’t even be bothered to rise to its feet. Algorithms feed them content they find compelling, and medical devices, hooked to them with tubes, keep them alive. He’s here to right a wrong on the level, he says, of Adolf Hitler and the Segway scooter.
Unfortunately, this crackly opening stretch is the high mark of the comedy-heavy science-fiction adventure penned by Matthew Robinson (“Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” “Love and Monsters”). “Good Luck” is an unfocused mish-mash of ideas.
Still, there’s fun to be had in some of the wildness that awaits after The Man From the Future finally collects this night’s band of brave souls: teachers Mark (Michael Peña, “A Million Miles Away”) and Janet (Zazie Beetz, “Joker”), distraught mother Susan (Juno Temple, “Ted Lasso”), prickly Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry, “People Just Do Nothing”), the allergic-to-tech Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson, “Unpregnant”) and a couple of other folks who don’t hang around long enough to justify learning their names.
(The Man originally declines Ingrid’s offer to help — saying something about her creeps him out, that he doesn’t need the off-her-meds vibes — but a potentially prophetic spinning bottle of hot sauce that points to her when it stops changes his mind. And thus Ingrid, who gets nose bleeds from Wi-Fi and cellular phones, obviously will prove to be important to the narrative.)
The band of adventurers embarks on a journey that’s both relatively short and, as The Man has promised, is laced with dangers. The intended destination is a house in which a 9-year-old boy is only a brief time away from completing the digital god. There’s no stopping this powerful entity from being created, The Man says, but if the AI safety protocols developed years later can be added to the code now, the future will be saved.
Along the way, Verbinski and Robinson flesh out a few of the characters with flashbacks, starting with Mark and Janet, as the issue of high school students being addicted to their phones is satirized effectively. Let’s just say the word “zombies” comes to mind to describe them.
A flashback involving Janet is less successful, the film attempting to offer commentary about the prevalence of school shootings in the United States. One daring early joke lands, but this section goes too far, as well-intentioned as it may be.
Lastly, we learn about Ingrid, whose analog-forward boyfriend, Tim (Tom Taylor), is mysteriously gifted a cutting-edge device.
“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” doesn’t give off the vibe that it’s all that concerned with making sense in the end, which is good, as it doesn’t. It’s also, at best, vaguely trying to keep a secret.
At the end of the day, it’s a time-loop movie, the rare one where we see only one small, if crucial, part of the circle the protagonist is traveling. And, you guessed it, the fun of witnessing other iterations of this hero’s journey is sorely lacking.
It certainly doesn’t help matters that the ending is bloated, contributing to a runtime that’s a bit longer than it needs to be.
This is Verbinski’s first film since his underrated 2017 effort, “A Cure for Wellness.” “Good Luck” lacks the striking looks of that movie and is less close in quality to 2003’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” and more toward that fun adventure’s first two lackluster sequels, which he also helmed.
Clearly no fan of AI, Verbinski, according to the film’s production notes, read Robinson’s script back in 2020 and sent it to Rockwell two years later. It finally arrives in theaters this week, at a time when AI is used regularly by many of us, so its relevancy remains. On the other hand, we are being bombarded with AI-inspired cautionary tales, and this one, while just slightly more entertaining than not, fails to stand out from the crowd, despite all its zaniness.
At best, if watched later at home, it may be a reason to put your phone down, at least intermittently.
‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’
Where: Theaters.
When: Feb. 13.
Rated: R for pervasive language, violence, some grisly images and brief sexual content.
Runtime: 2 hours, 14 minutes.
Stars (of four): 2.
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