Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be coming soon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
WHAT HAPPENS: At 10:10 pm on a specific night (not sure when) in L.A.’s Norm’s Diner a man (Sam Rockwell) appears and tells the 47 folks there he’s from the future (I guess his time-travel machine’s stashed somewhere, as he’s returned to his own era, re-visited Norm’s often), says he’s been here 116 times before (though no one knows him), needs to recruit a different group of 6 than he’s used previously (I forget—if I even knew—why this diner cluster holds the key to a successful cohort) to thwart a nearby 9-year-old boy from creating an AI that’ll enslave humanity in his era. Once he’s made his choices, we get brief backstory on 3 of them: Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz) are high-school teachers where Mark’s students are absorbed in their phones, but when he touches a phone the students rise en masse to chase him and Janet off their campus; Susan’s (Juno Temple) son, Darren (Riccardo Drayton), was killed in a school shooting so she arranged for a clone replacement, but this new “Darren” has an odd persona which disturbs Susan.
The group heads out on their mission to install programs from a USB drive into the boy’s computer which will insert humanity-embracing directives into the AI, saving us from a nightmarish future ruled by our own oppressive technology, although the AI in the Man’s era apparently knows what he’s doing, has provided obstacles to his quest in those previous 116 tries. A couple of these attackers are killed, the others taking refuge next door to the boy, when this version’s enemies are the high-school’s teenage mob leading Mark and Janet to lure them away while the Man, Susan, and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) find the boy (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), although Ingrid backs off due to her allergy to extensive technology. ⇒The boy (another clone) is pounding away on his keyboard yet puts up a fierce resistance, tells Ingrid the Future Man is actually her son, she should accept the intended changes. Instead, she plugs in the USB drive which seems to bring about a better environment celebrated by the group’s survivors (including returning Mark and Janet), but the Man senses something’s wrong, that the AI has just inserted them into a fake happy ending, so he goes back to his own time, reappears at the diner where Ingrid seems to know him this time as he tells her that for operation 118 he wants to infect all humanity with her allergy so people won’t be around the machines that intend to take them over.⇐ If you’d like considerably more plot detail (there’s plenty of it), you can go here; after that, I encourage you to watch this video analysis of the movie (8:34) which explores what that ending implies (do note both of these links include Spoilers).
SO WHAT? How you might respond to this increasingly-strange movie could depend on your fascination with a collage of notable references to other stories in the various realms of sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and drama. There may be others that eluded me, but what I saw connections to were Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) where the same events keep mysteriously repeating, The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) and its sequels where someone comes from the future into our present in hopes of preventing a cyber-takeover of humanity, Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) where ... Die's hordes of teenagers seem like zombies intent on retribution for disturbing their total attention to their cell phones, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) where, in this story, clones of children resemble the humans they’ve replaced but aren’t truly replicas of the originals, and—to a much lesser extent than these other clear examples—Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) in reference to the impactful diner scenes at the beginning and end. I enjoyed being aware of these past references, but they do beg the question of how much we’re supposed to appreciate what screenwriter Matthew Robinson has accomplished here vs. how attuned we’re supposed to be to this wealth of connections to, oh, so much which precedes … Die.
Beyond that, I also have several questions about what we see here that keep distracting me from a higher level of enjoyment with this movie, even though they might not bother you a bit; nevertheless, here are my queries. If the Man from the Future is brilliant enough to have built his own time machine (quite a feat!) why hasn’t he been able to find a strategy to combat the AI powers in our time to prevent the cyber-takeover in his era? Next, I’ll assume that like in this iteration of his quest some of his diner-cohort dies so do they revive again upon his next visit to our space-time location? (That would seem to be the case as he apparently finds the same 47 occupants of the diner every time he appears there, so that moment in space-time must always be the same even though it follows into 116 variations of history that, I assume, produce no new results in the attempt to thwart the emergence of the domineering AI?) If the Man has complete consciousness of his many previous attempts at changing the future why don’t any of the people in the diner have any such awareness, given that many of them (if not all) have been part of his previous attempts to save future humanity—⇒yet at the very end of this movie as the Man talks to Ingrid about his next strategy, she seems to be aware of what they’ve just experienced?⇐ I know, this is all fiction, but, Gore and Matthew, a few extra lines of dialogue could easily clarify my (unnecessary?) complaints, damn it!
BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: Good Luck … opened in domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on February 13, 2026 (may still be found in a very few of them), has grossed so far $8.4 million (globally $9.3 million), and now can be found via streaming where it rents for $19.99 on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and other platforms. The CCAL is generally supportive of you seeking out this extremely weird story, with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 83%, while the Metacritic average score is considerably lower at 66%. If you want encouragement to delve into this difficult scenario you can read what Peter Debruge of Variety says: “Such impertinence is bound to offend some audiences, even as others (Ernest Cline readers or Scott Pilgrim fans, for example) embrace it as the rare film that gets the post-ironic attitude they find on social media and in online forums. The title’s a pretty good clue to its tone. Channeling the flip, ‘Can you believe this guy?’ mojo he brought to ‘Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,’ Rockwell makes a great avatar for the cavalier stance that nothing matters when you get endless lives — a dangerous mentality among the gamer generation.” Of course, I seek to explore such praise with more hesitation, so I turned to my long-ago Texas hometown of Austin to cite James Scott of The Austin Chronicle: "Yet that intense energy can’t sustain the movie’s two-hour runtime, even with charismatic infusions from the star-studded supporting cast. […] The overall effect leaves one wishing this were an eight-episode miniseries – a phrase I never expected to write. […] Maybe I don’t love every element here in Verbinski and Robinson’s sci-fi treatise on putting down the damn phone, but ultimately? I’m glad they’re on humanity’s side. We need every weapon [...] even the ones rated two-and-a-half stars.”
You’ll have to decide for yourself if this movie fits your viewing intentions; meanwhile, have a listen to my usual wrap-up of a Musical Metaphor, this time "The Impossible Dream" from Man of La Mancha with Peter O’Toole as Don Quixote in the movie version (Arthur Hiller, 1971; based on the 1965 Broadway event with music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion, book by Dale Wasserman; it may be a bit of a silly choice, but the whole movie’s got its share of sillies also) as I see this Man from the Future as also determined to “try, when your arms are too heavy / To reach the unreachable star.” Sadly, though, this quest may ultimately result in failure as in Gordon Lightfoot’s "Don Quixote", as he might be “In vain to search again / Where no one will hear.” Note that exploratory video cited above for ongoing considerations about these possibilities in our world.
SHORT TAKES
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