Gore Verbinski’s Bonkers, Brilliant, Maddening Return — and the Most Fun You’ll Have Being Terrified About AI
Director: Gore Verbinski | Written by: Matthew Robinson | US Release: February 13, 2026 | Runtime: 2h 14m
Gore Verbinski has been away for nine years. In that time the world got louder, dumber, more addicted, and more afraid. He shows up with a man from the future, a Los Angeles diner, and a rogue artificial intelligence that has turned half the world’s children into something you don’t want to think about too hard. He is not interested in being subtle. He is not interested in your comfort. And somehow, against all odds, he has made one of the most purely enjoyable and quietly disturbing films of the year.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a sci-fi dark comedy. It holds a Certified Fresh 83% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 85% audience score.
What It’s About
A man — credited only as The Man, played by Sam Rockwell — bursts into a Norms diner in Los Angeles at exactly 10:10 PM and announces that he is from the future and needs volunteers to help him save the world. He has a specific theory: that a precise combination of the people in this diner will be capable of stopping a rogue artificial intelligence that is currently ending civilisation as we know it. He doesn’t know which combination. This is his 117th attempt. The others failed.
From that setup, screenwriter Matthew Robinson and Verbinski build something that is part screwball comedy, part horror film, part Black Mirror episode gone feral, part furious old man yelling at a wall — and somehow all of these things at once without any of them cancelling the others out.
Sam Rockwell Is Doing God’s Work
The film lives or dies on Rockwell and it does not die. This is one of the best performances of his career, which is saying something given that his career includes Moon, Three Billboards, and Seven Psychopaths. The Man is manic, funny, exhausted, occasionally terrifying, and underneath all of it, genuinely sad. He has done this 116 times before. He has watched the world end 116 times. He is running on fumes and conviction and he still manages to be the most alive person in every room he walks into.
The rest of the cast does what it needs to do. Haley Lu Richardson is warm and funny as Ingrid. Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz are good as the couple who get pulled in. Juno Temple does what Juno Temple does, which is make every line land slightly sideways from where you expected it. None of them are given as much to do as Rockwell, but none of them let the film down.
What It’s Actually About
The film is not subtle about its targets. Social media, AI slop, tech billionaires, the way an entire generation got handed a device at age eight and never came back — Verbinski has a lot to say and he says all of it, loudly, with a detonator. The villain is, essentially, a nine-year-old bald tech CEO, which is either the funniest or the most on-the-nose thing you’ve seen in a film this year depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing.
Here is the thing though: on-the-nose doesn’t mean wrong. The film’s targets are real. Its anger is real. And Verbinski earns the right to be preachy about this particular subject because he never lets the message slow down the movie. You can laugh and be scared and feel something at the same time. That is harder than it looks.
Some critics have called the commentary one-note and boomer-ish. There is something to that. The film occasionally feels like it was written by someone who recently discovered social media was bad and wants you to know immediately. But the best satire has always had that quality — it meets you where you are and drags you somewhere slightly further.
Verbinski Is Back and He Brought Everything
Gore Verbinski’s filmography is strange and great and undervalued. The Ring is one of the finest American horror films of its decade. Rango is a genuine masterpiece of animation that nobody talks about enough. Even Pirates of the Caribbean — which everyone remembers as a franchise and forgets as a film — is a genuinely original piece of blockbuster craft. A Cure for Wellness was too weird for its own good but too interesting to dismiss.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is Verbinski at his most feverish. The cinematography by Jim Whitaker keeps the diner and everything beyond it alive and slightly wrong — the colours are too bright in ways that make you uneasy before you know why. The direction has the energy of someone who has been waiting nine years to make something and spent all nine of those years figuring out exactly what he wanted to say.
The final twenty-five minutes have divided people. They go somewhere that is either brilliantly committed or too far depending on who you are. The ending does not resolve so much as arrive — it drops you somewhere and walks away. Some viewers find this unsatisfying. I found it honest. The film is not interested in giving you a clean exit. Neither is the thing it’s describing.
Where It Struggles
The R-rating is the film’s most visible tension. It clearly wants to be harder, stranger, more violent than it sometimes allows itself to be. There are moments where you sense Verbinski pulling a punch that should have landed fully, and the film is slightly smaller for it.
And the message, for all its energy, is occasionally repetitive. By the time the film has made its point about AI and social media and the death of attention and the commodification of childhood for the fifth time, you have received the message. The film keeps sending it anyway.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is messy, loud, uneven, and hard to forget. It is the kind of film that a big studio was never going to finance — Briarcliff Entertainment put it out instead, and it made $8 million, and that is a shame. More people should see this. Sam Rockwell is doing some of the best work of his career inside a film that is swinging for something real and mostly connecting. Gore Verbinski is back. The world he’s describing is the one we already live in. The title is good advice.
★★★★☆