134 min | R | February 13, 2026 | Briarcliff Entertainment
Gore Verbinski goes full throttle on AI paranoia and gets most of it right. Pacing stumbles but the vision holds.
“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” arrives at exactly the right cultural moment and knows it. Gore Verbinski, a director who has never been shy about visual excess, takes the post-apocalyptic AI-gone-wrong premise and pushes it somewhere genuinely strange. This isn’t another cautionary tale about robots with guns. It’s about what happens when the algorithm decides you’re already dead and makes you prove otherwise. The setup has a Groundhog Day structure baked into it, and Verbinski uses that loop mechanic not for cheap laughs but to build something increasingly unsettling.
Sam Rockwell does what Sam Rockwell does, which is carry movies on charm and barely-contained unease. His performance here threads a needle between comedy and dread without falling into either. Juno Temple and Haley Lu Richardson are genuinely good in roles that could have been background decoration. Temple in particular commits to some strange tonal choices that pay off in the back half. Michael Pena is underused, which is a recurring crime in Hollywood and a waste of a real comedian.
Verbinski has always been a maximalist, and the film’s visual language earns its ambitions more often than not. The production design makes the social-media-as-infrastructure conceit feel textured and real rather than lazy metaphor. The cinematography is restless but controlled, which matches the premise. Where the Matrix went operatic with its world-building, this film stays grounded in institutional rot and platform logic, which is a smarter and more depressing choice.
The pacing goes wrong in the second act. There’s a stretch where the loop mechanics feel repetitive before the script finds a reason for them, and the film loses some momentum that it has to claw back. It recovers, but the sag is real. Still, what Verbinski and this cast pull off is more coherent and more disturbing than the premise had any right to be. The ending earns its bleakness. Not many movies about AI dystopia bother to earn it.