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