“Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die” 2026, Movie Review

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

long stretches of absurdist nonsense that attempts to have more substance than it really does, propped up by very funny moments, good acting performances, and potential for a more meaningful narrative to be told with similar themes.

So…that was an experience to say the least.

The preamble to this movie watching experience was a drive through my city mere moments after a record breaking snow storm in my area, where I waded through six inches of freshly fallen snow on my local highway, fishtailing my way across town to see this movie. So needless to say, I was really pumped to have gotten out of the house and that I survived the drive to the theatre.

Despite all of the critique I am about to dish out for this movie, I will give credit where credit is due by acknowledging, at the very least, this movie decided to try and do something original in the sense that it was not a revamp or a reboot. And don’t get me wrong, I love a good adaptation, especially if it chooses to have a creative twist to it’s original source material. I also don’t mind sequels or reboots as long as they seemed to have been made in good taste with at least shreds of original creativity. But, with that being said, when movies are released that choose to develop an original standalone concept, I cannot help but grade them on a slightly more…flexible scale.

I give kudos to “Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die” solely on the premise that it was attempting to tell a “new” story. That also being said, an “apocalyptic sci-fi where ultra powerful AI consumes humanity and sees to our demise” is by no means a new concept for a story, and unfortunately, this anti-technology narrative had a lot more potential to be a funny and absurd commentary on the ever increasing reliance on technology and our never ending desire to be amused and numbed to our real world, but unfortunately I found that most of the time, the actual themes for the film fell flat for me, and generally I felt that this film just collected a lot of low hanging fruit without saying anything meaningful.

Things I really enjoyed

As much as I am going to critique this movie there are some parts of it I found to be very entertaining and interesting, and really a lot of my disappointments that come from this movie mostly comes from how I just feel a lot of the aspects I found to be interesting were just not explored in a meaningful way.

First off, there were some absolutely hilarious scenes in this movie that were delivered particularly well from actors Michael Pena and Sam Rockwell. Sam Rockwell’s performance as the man from the future who is trying to save the world from AI destruction is dry and jaded, punctuated by moments of uncharacteristic high-emotions and animated behavior. While his character is supposed to be brash and unfiltered I found the performance to be very charming and it is hard not to root for him in his unrelenting goal to “save the world”.

Generally, I found the charm of the actors to be the highlight of the film to me, and while the delivery of the themes of this story surrounding technology were not my favorite, I really would love to see more media tackling this theme head on the way this film attempted to.

Imitating excellence (and kind of failing)

So one thing I felt was super obvious to me was the similarities between this movie and “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once”, the 2022 Sci-Fi comedy film directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan. This movie was excellent in my opinion. For over two hours this movie does not let you rest, it makes you laugh and cry while exploring existential themes of purpose and life, while offering a visually remarkable cinematography, propped up by extremely moving performances by all sorts of actors new and old. It’s absurdist elements are balanced by universally meaningful themes, while also exploring themes of immigration and generational expectations. Overall, it was such a refreshing movie to see, and to this day it remains one of the better films to have been released this decade.

“Rock Scene” from the film “Everything Everywhere all at Once” 2022, dir. Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

With that being said, it is really difficult to ignore the ways in which “Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die” drew inspiration from “Everything Everywhere all at Once". It’s dedication to both “random” humor as well as this sort of “magical” flavor of sci-fi where the main characters are racing against the clock to save their worlds, but the major difference is that “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” chooses to use it’s sci-fi to explore the character dilemma’s and relationships, while the framework for “Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die” was not strong enough to stand on its own, and therefore, the film and story suffered. In “Everything Everywhere all at Once”, the dynamic between Evelyn, Waymond and Jobu is the true theme being explored by all of the interdimensional adventures. The sci-fi elements are just the medium in which their story of their family can be told. In the end, the themes we are supposed to take away from the story as an audience is really the story of the family and their relationships to one another, with a hint (or a hefty spoonful) of existentialism. To me, it is overwhelmingly obvious why this film won such a collection of Academy Awards, including the one for best picture.

So even though I had not even watched the trailer for “Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die” and went in completely blind (where I live we were all snowed in, so I went to the movies just wanting to see a comedy, and this one seemed intersting enough, I bought my ticket without reading any reviews or watching any promo) I almost immedietly clocked the similarities between these two films. I mean hell, I even felt that their posters seemed similar- maximalist designs, saturated color, even a pretty similar font.

And the only reason I draw attention to this is because I feel like the obvious imitation that “Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die” was attempting really harmed it. Because here is the issue, the absurdism and oddities of “Everything Everywhere all at Once” are explained in a very simple way, that is “there are all of these different dimensions, all of them are different from one another, and some of them are very similar to the one we are most familiar with, but others are completely bizarre.” Crazy things can happen and it doesn’t take away from the world, in fact most of the time it enhances it. There are simple rules laid out for the world and then the narrative follows it. Whereas in “Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die” absurd things happen and we aren’t really let in on why. I feel like the world is supposed to be close to the one we have now, but by the end of it,, things are just happening and nothing is ever really explained. Which, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely believe that not everything needs to be explained in a film or a story, and most of the time, leaving things unexplained is almost always a good idea. But I really feel like you have to ground your events in your world at least a little bit, or you basically are telling your audience that “anything can happen simply because I say so”.

Frankly by the time an enormous centaur-kitten abomination arrives to start eating teenage phone-zombies without any really explanation it made me really lose touch with the story. At that point, I just did’’t feel like there was any real explanation as to why any of that would and could happen. And in truth, you don’t have to do much explaining. You don’t have to create some complex conspiracy, just a general framework as to why things happen, and if your framework is solid enough the audience won’t feel the need to ask too many questions or demand explanations.

And I will also say, if your story and themes are strong enough, if your characters have enough depth to them, then it also can help subsidize an audience’s demand for understanding and answers, and in the end, when I compare these two, very similar films, one of them has enough depth and meaning to allow for more flexibility from me as a viewer, and one of them does not.

Waymond, played by Ke Huy Quan, was one of the performances I was most moved by in this film. His presence and chemistry with Michelle Yeoh was as good as any performance I have seen on screen.

Call me a snowflake all you want, but if you are going to use school shootings as a major plot and Comedic point in your film, you better be clever with it

Ok, I really dont mind dark comedy. I feel like some films like “Heathers” and “Better off Dead”, both of which use teen suicide as a major plot point, are clever and hilarious despite their subject material, and I don’t know, but I guess if you are going to choose to use a taboo and controversial subject such as school shootings as a major comedic beat in your film, you better make it funny, or it just comes off as kind of cheap and lazy.

One element of this story is how school shootings have become so common that not only is it a regular occurrence for most schools, but there is a super expensive, subscription based service to essentially clone the child you had lost in the shooting. Again, this could be clever, this could be funny, and it could potentially bring a topic as controversial as school shootings into a position in pop culture where we are able to speak about it in a free way. I think comedy has the potential to distigmatize taboo subjects and allow people to have more regular discussions about it, but it is a delicate line. If your attempts to speak comedically about something so sensitive, especially in a country such as the United States, you can look cheap and out of touch, and unfortunately I fear that this film did not deliver on this topic, comedically or thematically.

I am not sure, maybe it was because Juno Temple’s performance as Susan, the mother who loses her son in a school shooting, is so sincere in her portrayal as a grieving parent that it was difficult to see the shootings as anything but tragic, even with the comedic aspects of the child cloning like the advertisements her cloned son delivered occasionally, the weird dystopian party with all of the fellow parents of cloned children, and the mom’s who seem to be regulars in the department of losing children. All of it fell flat for me, partially because in a film about the critique of technology and AI, I felt that it was all just a little out of place to me. Especially because in the era in which technology has affected teen mental health so dramatically, I feel like if you wanted add a morbid twist on the film, teen suicide would have been more thematically relevant. I feel that school shootings are a heavier hitting element in a story with themes of gun control, poor leadership in government and contrived politics. I think if you wanted to have a “school shooting” element in a film, you would have to have an approach similar to that seen in “Mickey 17”, directed by Bong Joon Ho, starring Robert Pattinson, which shows how some people’s lives in a future dystopian society are blatantly undervalued, and how the leadership of said society cares for nothing but their own power and nationalistic values.

I guess this whole thing seemed out of place in the story, and in turn, made me feel that it was there only for shock value rather than to prop up the story as a whole.

I felt the acting of the main cast were extremely strong, highlighting Juno Temple and Sam Rockwell as my favorite performances.

A hopeful ending (????)

I want to live. I don’t want my life, or the lives of people I love, to be consumed by the ever marching progress of technology. I want to believe that safeguards and safety parameters put in place today will help us as humanity moves into such unknown territories with the development of AI and tech. And I don’t know, I was extremely disappointed when the thumb drive that Homme Du (Sam Rockwell) was so hell bent on delivering to the super AI being developed ended up being a total dud, it made me feel a sense of hopelessness for the path that humanity seems to be on.

We are all so addicted to our tech, and AI is only going to become more relevant to humans, and when the solution at the end of this film is to make everyone in humanity literally allergic to technology, I feel it sends a message that attempting to contain this super technology with safety parameters and legislation has no real purpose. That in the end, unless all of humanity decides to turn away from technology altogether, we will never be able to overcome this mass addiction. And I don’t know, I guess I want to believe that maybe our modern attempts at trying to wrangle modern tech is, to some degree, a worthy battle. That Paris Hilton’s support to pass the DEFIANCE act, which is to protect victims of AI generated deepfakes of explicit content, is a worthy an meaningful fight to fight. That the countless objections to the construction of data centers in communities is a meaningful defiance of the capitalistic march of technology. I, as a young woman of the 21st century, need to believe that there is a future in which technology and humanity get to live alongside one another, where humans don’t check out on life and our planet.

I guess I needed this film to have an ending where we get to have our cake and eat it too, which I guess is a fantasy, but that is why I go to the movies, right? I want to live out a fantasy, ignoring what can sometimes feel like the end of the world happening just outside of the double doors of my local theatre.