Dallas Film Now.

Sam Rockwell and Haley Lu Richardson star in Gore Verbinski’s madcap adventure.

A chaotic assault upon the senses, the newest film by director Gore Verbinski starts with a disruptive entrance into a diner by a man who claims to be from the future. 

The so-called ‘Man From the Future’ (Sam Rockwell) has the unruly appearance of an unhoused individual, which is matched by his speech and actions. Loudly declaring that he has arrived to save the future, he jumps on tables, grabs cell phones off tables, and generally terrorizes everyone in a wild-eyed attempt to recruit volunteers from amongst the stunned restaurant customers, filled with ordinary-looking people. Finally, a woman agrees to go with him. 

Once the woman, later identified as Susan (Juno Temple), joins up, the Man From the Future goads several more volunteers, including a couple sitting at the same table, Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), into joining him on his mission, only adding a final member out of desperation, a woman he initially rejects, clad in a princess costume, later identified as Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson). Then they’re off on a madcap adventure to find a key figure in the A.I. movement that is already infesting modern mankind and will lead to the end of civilization. 

Or so he bellows. And the key figure is a nine-year-old boy. 

Written by Matthew Robinson, a writer whose feature career began with his directorial debut, The Invention of Lying (2009) — a lively fantasy about a world where no one has ever lied — Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die conjures up a world much like our own, twisted a bit to imagine a crushing influence of artificial intelligence upon our daily lives in the here and now. It’s a world where everyone is glued to their mobile phones every minute, every day, which, actually, doesn’t sound too far removed from today. 

Director Gore Verbinski, who began his career with music videos before moving into the feature film world by helming the hyperactive Mousehunt (1997), has, in the years since, stuck to his artistic mandate that more is always better, and that faster is better than slower. His first feature in ten years, since the odd yet fascinating A Cure for Wellness (2016), more closely resembles his animated and wacky Western Rango (2011), in that it plays around with genre expectations in strange and unpredictable ways. 

In the lead role, Sam Rockwell is at his hyperactive best, matching the tone that Verbinski establishes in that first scene, overflowing with shouting, yelling, loudly imploring, demanding, blithe, uncaring, and, yet, utterly magnetic. The small group of diner customers become attached to him because they cannot resist his unlikely allure, in part that his words sound … accurate, to an uncomfortable degree. 

As wildly as he talks, his words hit home. No reasonable person can deny that too many of us are glued to our phones to an unhealthy degree and/or allowing technology to take over too large a percentage of our existence, to the point that the threat of losing power becomes a frightening thought. 

From this thread of highly-relatable believability, the ‘Man From the Future’ doesn’t sound as lunatic as he may appear to be. And each of the diner customers who accompany him have backstories in which a point of agreement with his sentiments can be more easily discerned, staring with Mark and Janet and their very discomfiting day, in which they both had highly-distressing days as high-school teachers — Mark as a substitute, Janet as a long-time instructor — and found the students turning against their teachers en masse. 

We also learn that Susan recently lost her son, only to be presented with a very creepy alternative from the high-technology universe, and that Ingrid is dealing with the end of a very promising relationship, again due to something involving “advanced” technology. 

In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the world steadily becomes unglued or, to borrow a phrase from the movie, “completely unhinged.” It’s so weird and wild and undisciplined and just plain messy and overstuffed that it may be repellant to a portion of its intended audience, who will run before they are an unintended casualty. 

Others, however, myself included, will avoid looking for deeper meaning and buy into the absolutely nuts, out of control spirit that runs wild throughout the movie and say at its conclusion: More, please. 

The film opens Friday, February 13, in select area theaters, via Briarcliff Entertainment. For locations and showtimes, visit the official site.