Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die - Review: A.I. (Anarchistic Intelligence)

 

Whoever said the technology apocalypse can’t be fun apparently never told director Gore Verbinski (“Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” “Rango”). His first film in over a decade, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” wants to take on the whole AI apocalypse subgenre with reckless abandon. Paired with writer Matthew Robinson (“The Invention of Lying,” “Love & Monsters”) and a stacked cast, he’s inviting audiences to put down their phones and embrace the madness.

The film stars Sam Rockwell (“Jojo Rabbit,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) as an unnamed man from the future seeking volunteers in a late-night diner to help him fight the impending AI apocalypse. He finds those volunteers in Mark, played by Michael Peña (“Ant-Man,” “Crash”), Janet, played by Zazie Beetz (“Atlanta,” “Deadpool 2”), Susan, played by Juno Temple (“Ted Lasso,” “The Offer”), Scott, played by Asim Chaudhry (“People Just Do Nothing,” “The Sandman”), and Ingrid, played by Haley Lu Richardson (“After Yang,” “Support the Girls”).

Rockwell leads his ragtag bunch with a performance jam packed with manic genius. It’s as if he stepped right out of a cartoon, imbuing this fearless man from the future with a gung-ho attitude and sense of willie Bugs Bunny charm. He carries the entire film and makes each wink and jab a little better than it already is. The supporting cast are all great as well. Peña and Beetz have good chemistry as a teacher couple, Temple is a surprisingly layered delight, and Chaudhry is an amusing presence in the madness. However, Richardson steals the show. There’s so much depth to Ingrid that she becomes the film’s co-lead, juxtaposing Rockwell’s can-do attitude with a more grounded approach. The pair are simple fantastic together.

Verbinski takes full advantage of this scrappy film’s lower budget, setting much of the adventure in dingy alleyways and abandoned houses. As they trip along this tale, it gives things a handmade quality that makes it feel more purposeful. Often times people describe a film with a bunch of actors joking and having fun as seeming like it was shot over a week. While this certainly has that quality, it's because things feel so shoestring. Each moment of action feels big because of the characters and stakes established, not a multi-100-million-dollar budget.

For as gleeful and hopeful as Rockwell’s character is, the film is chock full of some delirious dark subject matter. It takes it all in stride and with a smile, allowing this satirical edge to be pushed to its absolute limits. It’s not hard to see at times why a major studio might have passed on this material, but it imbues itself with a wink and smile and runs away with mischievous glee. It isn’t just that the film is having fun with the ideas, it's that the ideas that Verbinski and Robinson are positing aren’t too hard to see possibly coming true one day… unfortunately.

But at the core of the film is a massive beating heart. Regardless of the impending AI doom, scrappy filmmaking, or deep dark humor, the central core of the film becomes remarkably hopeful and pure as things progress. It works because it feels genuine; not polished or saccharine but coming from an honest place. It recontextualizes most of the film by the end, even down to the central idea of Rockwell’s time looping future man and leaves things on a far more hopeful note than one might expect from a tale as heightened and timely as this one.

“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” is the sort of movie people will look back on in a decade as a Bonafide cult hit. It’s got all the wackiness and inventive dark comedy one would need to tackle this kind of subject with a hearty dose of genuine human emotion and inventiveness. This is the sort of film, carried by its cast, that wants to look oblivion right in the face and give it bunny ears, laughing all the way home. If you can stomach the dark comedy, you’ll be more than happy to go along for the ride. 4.5/5

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie - Review: The Greatest Time Travel Movie Ever Ripped Off

 

Somehow in our endless age of reboots, remakes, sequels, prequels, and legacy sequels, there’s still a bit of creativity floating around Hollywood. Well, not necessarily Hollywood… but somewhere slightly more northern. After years of skirting the fair-use legal loopholes, writer/director Matt Johnson (“Operation Avalanche,” “Blackberry”) has returned to the webseries/television show that made him and his longtime friend and co-writer Jay McCarroll Canadian household names. This is “Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie.”

The film follows Johnson and McCarroll playing fictionalized versions of themselves, living in Toronto and attempting to fulfill their lifelong dream: playing a show at the Rivoli bar in downtown Toronto, despite never having written a song or even rehearsed ever before. This plan comes to a head when Matt decides to turn their RV into a time machine to trick the Rivoli into believing that they are from the future with a message to allow them to perform a show to prevent the end of the world. However, things take a turn after he accidentally creates a working time machine, sending the pair back to the ancient times of 2008.

If fictional Johnson and McCarroll are always in search of a way to perform, then real Johnson and McCarroll are always in search of a way to entertain. From the very first moment, “NTBTSTM” is constantly throwing bizarre bits and humor the viewers way in an attempt to make them laugh by any means. It’s a delirious sense of humor that will exhaust some, but it never stops feeling earnest the entire time. There’s even an ingenious blending of the original webseries version’s old footage that makes it seem as though this film was planned out over fifteen years prior to make it all work.

Even better though is the film’s use of real life situations. Like “Borat” and other real life films of that ilk, much of the movie is spent watching this story play out in the midst of locations and real people Johnson and McCarroll didn’t get permission from. It means the bizarre nature of their antics not only gets an added dash of realism from these reactions, but it serves as a meta layer of humor on top of everything else. What was faked? What was real? Did McCarroll really end up getting chased by the cops? Who knows? This pair made a movie based on their TV show about a band that doesn’t make music that doesn’t require you to watch the TV show. It’s as if the concept of the movie existing is a joke as well.

The 2008 time period also allows Johnson to flex some truly impressive behind the scenes fair-use muscle. For those unaware, fair-use is a legal doctrine that allows a filmmaker to utilize a piece of copyrighted work, such as film clips, music, images, etc., so long as it is required to tell the story they want to tell. So when movie Johnson rewatches “Back to the Future” on loop to prepare the RV, it’s allowed because it’s required to tell the story. This means that some of the film’s most outrageous reveals and moments feel both like tributes to our deeply pop-culture obsessed society and joyful rib-tickling bits at the expense of said society. For example, the way in which movie Johnson definitively realizes they are in 2008 is not only a genius utilization of fair-use, but one of the funniest movie moments of the year.

Oddly enough, beyond the odd real life prank humor and pop-culture shenanigans, what surprises the most is the heart beneath these antics. While it might be told with the sly smirk of a trickster, “NTBTSTM” is a film about friendship and what it means to be someone’s best friend. Johnson and McCarroll have been real life best friends for decades, and their banter and bickering comes across entirely authentic here. Even in the film's cheesiest lines and most saccharine moments, it feels deeply rooted in this pair’s real friendship. You’d almost be convinced Johnson wanted to make this movie just to keep hanging out with his best friend.

For those who are completely out of the loop on the antics of Johnson and McCarroll’s fictional selves, and there will be many, most of this likely sounds like the ramblings of a late night Adult Swim special rather than a feature length film. But Johnson and McCarroll are experts in their field of low-budget antics and manage to dance around even the tightest of restraints to turn this adventure into something special. They are Nirvanna The Band and this is one of the funniest movies of the year. 4.5/5

The Reel Life's Year in Film: Best of 2025

Join me in celebrating this year in film as I count down my top 10 films of 2025, as well as highlighting my most surprising, best actor, and best actress, and other individual awards.