'Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die' isn't shy about hating AI

Sci-fi satire takes big, clumsy swings at our tech-obsessed lives

Sam Rockwell makes a big entrance in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.” (Briarcliff Entertainment)

Like a high school student who uses Grok to fact-check his essay, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” isn’t nearly as clever as it thinks it is.

The sci-fi satire has a lot of style, gusto, and a firm “AI will destroy humanity” perspective I can get behind, aiming for the profane energy of an indie comic book or a Jason Pargin novel (“John Dies at the End.”) But it’s just not as funny or fast-moving as it needs to be, getting bogged down during its baggy 135-minute running time in clumsy character development and glib observations about our tech-obsessed present (Kids are on their phones too darn much!)

Although a truly bananas third act, which it feels like writer Matthew Robinson and director Gore Verbinski saved their most gonzo ideas for, is almost worth the wait.

Sam Rockwell is certainly well-cast as a self-proclaimed Man from the Future, sporting a scraggly beard, plastic trench coat and some sort of futuristic uniform festooned in grimy dials and gears. He makes a big entrance in a diner and announces to the bewildered customers that he’s come back to our time to save humanity from a world-killer AI that’s about to become sentient. He firmly believes that a team made up of some combination of the greasy spoon’s occupants will help him achieve his mission. Although he’s tried 117 times before and failed, so he’s not too optimistic.

The time traveler assembles his crew, and we get a little backstory into who some of them are, each vignette playing like a lesser episode of “Black Mirror.” Two high school teachers (Michael Pena and Zazie Beetz) watch as smartphones literally turn their students into zombies, and a grieving mother (Juno Temple) gets the chance to resurrect her dead son in the form of a corporate-friendly clone. The tone of the satire whipsaws between dark gray to pitch black, which can feel destabilizing for the viewer. I sort of liked the unevenness, how you are never sure where or how far a scene is going to go.

But the only one that really pops is Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a troubled young woman who is physically allergic to tech, and watches in horror as her boyfriend becomes a VR addict. Richardson alone understands the assignment, which is for dystopian satire to work, you can’t act as if you’re in on the joke. She plays Ingrid dead serious, and ends up giving “Good Luck” the emotional center it sorely needs.

The team doesn’t have to go far to complete its mission – the AI is being created by a nine-year-old boy a few blocks away from the diner. But it feels like it takes a long time to get there. Much of the middle of “Good Luck” features the actors creeping through dark tunnels and warehouses, occasionally getting caught up in generic action sequences.

Things get much more visually interesting in ways I won’t spoil when the crew finally make it to the little boy’s house. The AI seems to throw everything it can think of to stop them, much as Verbinski and Robinson throws everything at the screen to keep us from losing interest. Verbinski is a playful visual stylist (“The Ring,” “Mouse Hunt”) who hasn’t made much of note in the past decade, and it’s nice to see his gonzo energy on the big screen again, even fitfully. I’d like to believe that AI couldn’t dream up some of the things that “Good Luck” splatters on screen in the last 30 minutes. But maybe I’m kidding myself.

So I had some fun at “Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die.” But other times the movie struck me as what AI would write if it tried to come up with something to make AI-haters look ridiculous.

“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” opens Friday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at AMC Fitchburg 18, Marcus Point, and Marcus Palace.