Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die ★★★

Released: 20 February 2026

Director: Gore Verbinski

Starring: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Pena, Zazie Beetz, Juno Temple

At a time when the phrase “just ask ChatGPT” has become the Gen Alpha equivalent of “googling”, it’s unsurprising that filmmakers are starting to reckon with artificial intelligence’s apocalyptic rise and the crisis of late-stage capitalism. After seeing what Radu Jude could do with his starkly acidic takedown of GenAI in Dracula, we now have Gore Verbinski—one of the most reliable visual artists in the mainstream—taking a shot at an AI satire with a distinctly sardonic flair. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a swing few filmmakers can afford (and even less are able to pull off), but its defiant earnestness is a welcome reminder that measured cynicism doesn’t have to be completely devoid of humanity.

Equal parts Idiocracy and Southland Tales, Verbinski’s latest is as scatterbrained as it is deceptively clever: when a bedraggled time traveler (Sam Rockwell) randomly shows up at an LA diner, a ragtag bunch of survivors are forced to save the world from a renegade AI that threatens to eliminate free will and render core human values obsolete. The journey takes the unlikely crew down the cop-ridden streets of Los Angeles, a capitalist hellscape where pig-masked criminals and screen-obsessed teenagers hunt down anyone bold enough to dash their hopes for idyllic techno utopianism.

With energy to match its gaming-inspired title (“glhf” is a common chat phrase in online multiplayer games), Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die operates on a madcap wavelength fitting for Verbinski’s endearingly maximalist approach. There’s real vigour to his framing of a not-so-distant future: just as nasty and vulgar as you’d expect Sam Altman’s dreams to look like, an ugly world where the tragedy of gun violence can be solved by cloning and commercial-infused children representing brands like TikTokers doing an ad-read. Admittedly, it’s still a far cry from the expansive creativity seen in A Cure for Wellness or The Ring, opting for a somewhat cartoonish look at the anxieties of the digital age that comes with its fair share of pulled punches.

Thankfully, the ensemble cast is fully on board with Verbinski’s headier concepts. Juno Temple and Sam Rockwell are delightful in their respective roles, with the former acting as the film’s emotional anchor in one of the most touching-yet-farcical flashback sequences. It’s a real testament to the filmmaker’s ability to balance levity with something as haunting as school shootings, depicting contemporary horrors as a never-ending absurdist nightmare livestreamed to Twitch.

There’s certainly more to Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die than the “phone = bad” critique it appears to be on the surface. Verbinski is angry, but his frustration is entirely justified: when the American education system is clearly failing the next generation, it’s hard to look at the rampant anti-intellectualism without a healthy dose of cynicism. The collective delusion around fancy plagiarism machines is just as ludicrous as the concept of a wifi allergy, with the former arguably being more surreal than anything Verbinski could ever come up with. Perhaps, some of the internet humor used here is a bit too easy for the filmmaker’s grand ideas and his politics aren’t quite as radical as they seem, but the film ultimately functions as a genuinely compelling conversation starter — a positively weird and wacky one, at that.