gore verbinski

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Brandon forewarned me that he didn’t much care for Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, but based on what he related about the film, I had a feeling that I would enjoy it more than he did. For the entirety of the its darkly comedic first half, I barely went more than five minutes without a hearty chuckle. Around the midpoint, however, even though the film’s comedic tone remained largely the same, the laughs became fewer and farther between. Immediately after leaving the theater having watched the film, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had been let down by the fairly conventional (as much as that descriptor can apply here) second half, and we are very much aligned on what works and what doesn’t. 

Good Luck opens with a purported time traveler (Sam Rockwell) arriving in a diner called Norm’s, where he informs the smartphone-addicted diners therein that he has arrived from the future to alter the upcoming AI quantum singularity — not by preventing its creation at the hands of a nine year old genius (as its genesis is supposedly inevitable) but by uploading a software patch that will result in the AI having a sense of ethics and benevolence. This is his 117th attempt to put right what once went wrong, as he is convinced that some combination of diners will result in the correct team to keep this apocalypse from kicking off. Using knowledge of the customers he’s gained in previous time loops, he gathers a small squad: ill-fated Boy Scout troop leader Bob, high school teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple), boisterous Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and offbeat loner Ingrid (The White Lotus season two’s Haley Lu Richardson). Together, they have to make it out of the diner and across the city so that the future man can plug in a USB that will prevent the apocalypse, all while avoiding trigger-happy police, mask-wearing assailants wielding automatic weapons, and eventually, a chimeric monster made of cats. 

Interspersed with this journey are the vignettes about the diners and their individual experiences with the various pieces of technology that will converge into our future overlord. While working as a substitute at the school where Janet is employed full time, Mark discovers that the students have become mindless automatons that—between verbalizing the occasional brand name—act as a horde at the direction of something within their phones. Susan loses her son in a school shooting but is presented with the opportunity to “resurrect” him, after a fashion. Ingrid suffers from a condition that makes her nose bleed in the presence of wireless signals, leaving her little opportunity to find gainful employment; for a time, she’s able to get by as a generic “princess” character for little girls’ birthday parties, but as the prevalence of children using smartphones increases, she finds even this avenue to be a dead end. Compounding things, her equally luddite boyfriend is eventually tempted to try on a set of VR goggles, which leads him to choosing to “transition” into the virtual world full time, leaving her completely alone. Finally, we also get to see what the time traveler’s life was like growing up, in a world in which half of the population lives “jacked in” to the AI’s perfect virtual world, while the other half has perished. 

You’ll notice that the first two backstories sound bleak, and while they are, the darkness within them is played for some great satirical humor. Mark and Janet’s story is a zombie pastiche that plays out like David Tennant-era Doctor Who attempting to do a Black Mirror plot, and although its “phones make you stupid” concept comes off as a bit of intergenerational youth-bashing at first, the blasé treatment of a school shooting is just observational enough to punch through the discomfort of the situation. Susan’s story is much more heart-breaking, as she learns that her son has been gunned down in another “unpreventable” school shooting, but that he can “come back” in a cloned form that is mostly subsidized by the government since he was the victim of campus-based gun violence. He’s not the same, of course, and she reluctantly accepts the delivery of a shallow shadow of her child who occasionally recites ad copy about a low-calorie peach tea. It’s very grim stuff, but this is also the funniest part, as the tragedy is treated with the same casual shoulder-shrugging that mass shootings in America are given in reality, and all of the bits within it land: the salesman who can hardly disguise his annoyance at being given a “first timer” or his boredom as he tries to speedrun Susan through her customization options, the vapid disregard for the tragedy that other moms who have already replaced their children before display, and the couple who have clearly succumbed to madness after going through the process four times and decided to do a “goofy one” this time around. This is also the more straightforward Black Mirror… let’s say “homage,” as this essentially smashes together the plots of “Common People” and “Be Right Back,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not effective unto itself. 

It’s here that the film takes a downward turn for me, as the flashbacks we get for both Ingrid and the man from the future are completely lacking in moments of levity, even of the extremely dark kind. Ingrid’s loss of the one person she thought she could trust, who was turned into an obedient slave to the machine after only the smallest temptation, isn’t fun to watch. It’s also where the film feels the most reactionary in a way that doesn’t necessarily fit with the rest of the film’s thesis. Ingrid’s boyfriend, after spending his days in the VR headset over the course of less than a week seems to become completely radicalized without any regard for how his lifestyle change affects his partner. She comes home one day to find him having prepared dinner for them, acting out of character, and it’s during this seeming return to their happy domesticity that he springs on her that he’s going to “transition,” which seems like a loaded term in this context. What he’s doing is essentially allowing himself to be voluntarily hooked into the nursing home equivalent of one of those goo vats from The Matrix and live the rest of his life in the perfected version of reality that the machine promises. If anything, he’s “uploading,” but the use of transition, in combination with other behaviors, feels like a regressive take. Perhaps this is best demonstrated in his frustration that Ingrid doesn’t understand the niche slang that he’s suddenly picked up from those people he’s meeting online, you know, the ones predatorily encouraging him to transition? It hews too close to right wing conspiracy signaling for me, and I didn’t like that. 

As one would imagine, the future man’s childhood is the most bleak, and as a result, when the back half of the film has to try and maintain a sense of comedic balance with the first half, it has to push its jokes out of the vignettes and into the framing device of the group trying to divert the quantum singularity before the timer on the traveler’s wrist finishes its countdown. This narrative has been jokey throughout, but the bits within it vary wildly in their success. Sam Rockwell yelling at a diner full of people? Goes on too long before he starts to demonstrate his knowledge of people gathered from previous loops, but once that starts, the jokes start to land better. Convincing Bob to draw the fire of the assembled police force outside? Decent enough, but barely consequential. In the second half, this has to escalate, so instead we get some exposition about the programmer’s access to both 3D printing tech and (presumably) the cloning potential from the company that “resurrected” Susan’s son and so we get a kaiju made of memes that didn’t work for me at all. It did get a 50% approval rating in my screening, since my viewing companion and I were alone and he enjoyed it, so it may work for others. The final showdown goes on for just a little too long and is, as noted in the intro, a bit of a conventional place for this narrative to go (its few “twists” will surprise no one but children). Bizarrely, the film concludes open-endedly; it’s not exactly calling for a sequel, but it’s clear that the ending is written with greater importance placed on that possibility than the importance of a satisfactory conclusion. Given that the film had plenty of things to say but had already run out of them by the time it ended, I think an ending that was either optimistic or nihilistic would have been a wiser way to go, rather than an unambitiously ambiguous one. It’s a little overcooked, but the highs of the first half carry it across the finish line despite the lows of the second, and it averages out to be pretty good overall. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Adpocalypse Now

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

It feels trite to say this right now, given that America is currently squirming under the boot of an openly fascist presidential regime, but the escalating omnipresence of corporate advertising in every aspect of daily life is starting to feel outright apocalyptic. It was already demoralizing enough when corporations convinced us to advertise brand names on our clothes, so that we’re paying to display billboard space on our own bodies, but once they caught up with the fact that we spend most of our time looking at each other through screens instead of in person, things have only gotten worse. Yes, the internet is a convenient access point to a wider world of art and social interaction, but it’s also an easy access point to funnel nonstop advertisement into our eyeballs. Every streaming service is just a variation of the Tubi model now, inserting commercial breaks into shows & movies we’re already paying to watch. Those old-guard artforms are also gradually being replaced with social-media microcelebrities, who skip the middleman and deliver shameless sponcon as the main source of entertainment instead of an occasional annoyance. Credit card companies control what we can do & see online via what kinds of content they allow to be monetized, stepping in as the internet equivalent of the MPAA to determine what does and does not qualify as pornography, and what forms of pornography are “allowed”. I could go on, but you have a phone, so you’re already well aware of mainstream culture’s slow-motion landslide into a corporate-sponsored Hell pit. It’s a pervasive menace that darkens & distorts every aspect of modern human life, and it’s willing to choke what’s left of that life out of us as long as it can also squeeze out our last few pennies with it, as indicated by the current advertising push for the resource-draining evils of generative A.I. So, I was pleased to discover two new movies in theaters right now that treat the exponential relentlessness of corporate advertising as the existential threat that it truly is — both of which were packaged with trailers advertising other new movies to check out while they’re in theaters, of course.

In her self-satirizing mockumentary The Moment, pop singer Charli XCX treats corporate advertising as an existential threat to art. Set during her Big Moment following the blow-up of her album Brat last summer, The Moment imagines what would happen if Charli made the same corporate business deals that took other pop stars like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber to “the next level” during their own respective Big Moments. Her in-film record label scores two major (fictional) deals on her behalf: a credit card marketed exclusively to queer clientele and a production of a Disney+ style concert film documenting the Brat world tour. The Brat credit card deal makes for an easy, funny punchline mocking the crass commodification of identity politics and is deployed in the film as a form of recurring prop comedy. The production of the Brat concert film is a more nuanced debacle, with Alexander Skarsgård stepping in as a corporate-stooge movie director determined to sand off all of Charli’s roughest edges so she can be marketable to a more Family Friendly audience. Instead of sticking around to fight the good fight with her longtime creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), Charli folds under the pressure and allows Skarsgård to take over, turning the coked-out club classics nightlife vibe of the Brat album into a cigarette-themed version of The Eras Tour. It’s an oddly vulnerable PR move, in that it can be read as Charli satirizing herself as indecisive to the point of having no artistic convictions at all, portraying her as being personally incapable of maintaining a clear creative ethos once corporations step in to promote her art to a wider audience. The more generous reading, of course, is that she’s saying that no one can stand up to that kind of corporate pressure, and that’s why all corporate-sponsored art sucks. Whether she’s the butt of her own joke or she’s throwing punches at peers, it’s at least clear that the real villains are the credit card companies and the assembly-line hack directors who are willing to sacrifice art to the almighty altar of Advertising.

In the new sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, director Gore Verbinski (along with screenwriter Matthew Robsinson) treats corporate advertising as an existential threat to human dignity. Sam Rockwell stars as a time-traveler from a near-future dystopia that has been overrun by A.I. In order to stop his grim timeline from coming to pass, he must quickly recruit random customers from a Los Angeles diner to put a stop to that A.I.’s creation over one long, zany night before it’s too late. This A-plot premise is broadly generic in both its LOL So Random style of humor (think “hotdog fingers” and you get the gist) and in its observations on smartphone addiction, in which all teenagers are portrayed as George Romero zombies who aimlessly wander through the city while staring at their screens. There is some biting satire scattered throughout the film’s Black Mirror-inspired vignettes, however, once the focus shifts away from Rockwell’s all-in-one-night mission to profile the daily lives of the diners he takes hostage. Juno Temple’s screentime as a single mom who loses her teenage son to a school shooting is especially fruitful, both in how it portrays America’s treatment of those shootings as being as unavoidable of a natural occurrence as bad weather, and in how the tragedy invites advertising into her family home. After her son is killed, the grieving mother is sold on purchasing a cloned version of him, but she can’t afford the luxury model, so her subscription comes with ads. A corporation has smoothed out all of the details of her son’s personality until he is a generic non-entity, and they’ve doubled that indignity by making him a mouthpiece for IRL sponcon, spouted as if it were casual conversation. Likewise, the Romero zombie teens elsewhere in the film speak entirely in ad placements when not staring blankly at their screens, satirizing the ways in which modern online discourse has turned us all into uncompensated employees of marketing companies. With or without an inevitable A.I. takeover, we are already doomed.

Unfortunately, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die far exceeds its LOL So Random allowance by the end, and it’s ultimately just not very good. Gore Verbinski has made exactly one fully satisfying film to date (Mouse Hunt, duh), and ever since then he can only manage to stage extravagant disappointments that almost kinda-sorta work if you squint at them from the right angle, among which Good Luck is no exception. He has a very Baz Luhrmann-coded career in that way (Strictly Ballroom, duh). Charli XCX’s movie is much less ambitious and, thus, has a much easier path to success. One of The Moment‘s more reliably successful gags is the way luxury brands, hotel chains, and sponsorship deals are announced in the strobe-lit block text that has accompanied all of Charli’s recent concert performances, very directly using her art to advertise corporate products. Most of the film is shot in the grainy, low-lighting texture of modern fly-on-the-wall documentaries, and most of the humor registers as similarly low-key. That makes for a much less ambitious source of comedy than the anything-can-happen-at-any-moment zaniness of Good Luck, which works up an excess of flop sweat while scrambling across Los Angeles in search of the next randomized Mad Libs punchline. For all of the ways Verbinksi’s latest might disappoint as a comedy, however, it’s easy enough to get behind its resentful messaging about how our culture-wide smartphone addiction has “robbed us all of our dignity and turned us into children.” Despite all of its cutesy visual gags, dirt-cheap guitar riffs, and Deadpool-level ultra sarcasm, it’s at least pointing its finger at the right cultural boogeyman. Corporate advertising is going to kill us all, and we’re inviting more of it into our brains every second we spend looking at our phones. Now excuse me while I check every local cinema’s website to plan what showtimes I will purchase tickets for next.

-Brandon Ledet

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Is it possible to love every frame of a motion picture and still think it amounts to a bad movie? A Cure for Wellness is a visually stunning, go-for-broke slowburner that somehow estimates a Hammer Horror by way of The Matrix aesthetic and still fails to succeed as a complete, satisfactory picture. It’s impressive that a major studio production directed by a man best know for helming the exhaustingly empty swashbuckling blockbusters The Pirates of the Caribbean could possibly be this deeply strange & willing to delve into exploitative cruelty. The problems that plague other major Gore Verbinski projects persist here, however; A Cure for Wellness is too long, too dumb, and too disappointingly self-serious for how well crafted it is as a visual object. A filmmaker with this meticulously inventive of an eye should likely have much better taste when it comes to telling stories, instead of applying that craft to something so idiotically pointless at its best, genuinely evil at its worst.

Dane DeHaan echoes the same goofy Keanu Reeves impersonation he took to outer space in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in his lead role as a laptop-addicted Business Prick. While climbing the corporate ladder at The Big Company (I honestly have no idea what his job details outside getting visibly frustrated with incongruous graphs on various computer screens), he is deployed on a mission to recover a member of the the board who has gone AWOL. This path leads him to a Swiss spa/health retreat, where the man he’s tasked to bring back to the Corporate World has checked himself in as an AWOL permanent patient. Like the commune in the back end of [safe], this sanitarium/cult is presented as a cure-all for the ills of modern living. “Diseases” like self-doubt & the “illusion of material success” are “cured” through sensory deprivation, “water therapy,” and mysterious droppers filled with special “vitamins,” leaving all patients essentially lobotomized & stuck in a limbo. The more times DeHaan’s Business Prick upstart declares “I am not a patient!” as he struggles to complete his intended mission, the further he loses himself in the daily rituals of the spa cult, discovering long-buried secrets of incest, murder, brainwashing, collusion with the law, and immortality-seeking science experiments along the way. By the time castle fires & monstrous ancestors are introduced in the mix, the film could easily pass for a Hammer production or an entry in The Corman-Poe Cycle (if it were half as long and half as dumb).

The most immediately apparent problem in A Cure for Wellness is its gleeful cruelty in its approach to sexual assault. This starts very early with an out of nowhere racist prison rape joke and culminates in a scene involving an underage girl that goes on way longer than necessary to gets its point across, easily slipping into exploitative cruelty. It’s a mean streak that has little, if anything, to do with the film’s core themes and likely should have been edited into oblivion, but it’s also a blatant flaw that doesn’t require much deliberation. What really drags the film down is unwieldy and underdeveloped it feels for a movie that’s nearly three hours long.

A Cure for Wellness‘s greatest strength is its absurdity as an overwhelming, bat shit crazy genre picture. Marrying high production values to a low trash premise that doesn’t deserve it, the film is loaded with weirdo imagery of slithering eels, steam punk machinery, medicine bottles, eels, ballerina figurines, soft naked flesh, eels, RoboCop action figures, and even more eels, sometimes all rapidly flashing on the screen in dream sequence montage. It just doesn’t contain enough of those visual pleasures to justify the massive weight of its runtime. In some respects, the weirdest choice the movie makes is withholding the answers to mysteries that are immediately apparent to the audience for several scenes, then treating their reveals like a big deal no one saw coming. Lies, accidents, past traumas, and untold motivations are kept under wraps in see-through gauze, essentially treading water instead of making the movie shorter or pulling the trigger immediately to make room for more oddities. For instance, why make a huge deal out of the mystery of what’s making DeHaan’s toilet tank rattle for three or four scenes if the reveal is only going to be that it was eels all along? We immediately knew it was eels. Everything in the film is brimming with eels. Delaying that reveal does not build tension; it just wastes time.

The ideal version of A Cure for Wellness is probably about an hour shorter and directed by Guillermo del Toro. On some level, I do very much appreciate the taste for excess that Verbinski brings to the project, especially when it comes to his eye for over-the-top visuals. Framing shots from the POVs of magnifying glasses, fish bowls, and taxidermy eyeballs, the film is about as tastefully overachieving as Michael Bay’s Armageddon and I love that kind of go-for-broke excess in my genre films. The eel imagery is also impressively chilling, even if employed often & never thematically justified. Equipped with that same imagery, I’d trust del Toro to deliver a much more satisfying narrative, though. Not only would the sexual assault mean streak lightly be softened or diminished, but there’s a fairy realm element to the Swiss spa (especially in how you’re not supposed to drink the water) I could see being better explored in his hands. Verbinski’s direction works very well when setting up individual scares gags (especially ones involving eels & dentistry), but his unwieldy, unending, thematically thin blockbuster approach to the Pirates movies has bled over here in a way that poisons what makes the movie enjoyable. A Cure for Wellness is an impressive visual achievement for sure, but not impressive enough to justify the enormity of its runtime or the exploitative cruelty of its ultimate destination. The resulting experience is endlessly frustrating, as it could easily be a much better picture with the right creative push, either towards brevity, away from sexual assault exploitation, or into another director’s hands entirely.

-Brandon Ledet