We wish you Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die!

Often bursting into our local café is a man looking like he got dressed in the dark and clutching a sausage roll at arms distance shouting, ‘Watch out, it’s a bomb!!’ It’s for good reason that he goes by the name of Mental Mickey. ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ opens with a similar scene in an LA diner when Sam Rockwell bursts in wearing what looks like something from the catalogue pages of ‘Best Dressed Suicide Bomber’ and claiming to be from the future. He wants  volunteers to help him save the world and it turns out that this is not the first time he’s burst into the diner for this purpose of recruitment to his cause dismissing several volunteers as he has used them before only for them to have been killed on his previous missions.

The Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die story!

The Angelinos regard him as the usual LA sideshow before they return to their meals and crucially their phones. But having seen this reaction to his demand 117 times previously he knows how to play the room underlining his claims with a button he holds in his hand that will detonate the bomb strapped to his chest (Mental Mickey never strapped sausage rolls to his chest choosing to defuse them by eating them). He drafts a disparate group of seven to join him that includes single mum Susan (Juno Temple), punk princess in a dog eared fairy princess dress Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), school teachers Mark (Michael Pena) & Janet (Zazie Beetz), Uber driver  Scott (Asim Chaudhry leaving behind his People Just Do Nothing persona), scout master Bob (Daniel Barnett) and foodie customer Marie (Georgia Goodman). And as Rockwell ‘s man from the future tells them some if not all may well die on their mission. And off they go to save mankind facing a number of disparate obstacles that takes in pig masked assassins to a giant cat/horse hybrid that pees glitter and eats people.

The film is as chaotic as it sounds and is at its best with flashbacks of the customers lives  that has bought them to the moment where Rockwell rocked up at the diner. Matthew Robinson’s script takes some neat shots at the world’s seemingly inescapable addiction to social media – a well deserved target in an age of influencers and the film has  many neat touches notably one where Cena’s teacher makes the mistake of touching one of his pupils phones setting off a catastrophic reaction throughout the film.

The return of a blockbuster director

All this is orchestrated by director Gore Verbinbski whose career has fluctuated wildly with box office blockbusters ( Pirates of the Caribbean) to box office bombs (The Lone Ranger) via Oscar wins (2012’s  Best Animated film ‘Rango’). But this is his first film in ten  years after 2016’s A Cure for Wellness (which also bombed) and his return to film making is with a bloated and overlong satire that desperately needed sharpening up which its often imaginative visuals cannot hide.

Have fun?

There’s undoubtedly a time now for an excoriating satire about our digital age where a population are glued to their phones doom scrolling through trivia and tat to the detriment of themselves and others but ‘Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die’ is not it with a convoluted title that for some might trip off the tongue but ultimately falls flat on its face.

related feature : “I’m Doing My Part”: Casper Van Dien on the on-set madness of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers

related feature : The most expensive flops ever

Here’s the trailer for ‘Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die’ ……