A man claiming to be from the future recruits a gaggle of dubious diner patrons in yet another effort to save the world from the threat of a destructive Artificial Intelligence.
Sam Rockwell, who plays our nameless Man from the Future, has a history of doing quirky characters and even odder films. The child chaos of Jojo Rabbit, the quiet desperation of Moon, the utter out-of-this-world zaniness of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; that man has been in some unique ones. And as such, is the perfect fit for the plastic trenchcoat-wearing hand-drawn-map-sporting nameless Man from the Future who is our exhausted but determined protagonist. Set your disbelief aside and put that phone down already, and let’s get into this!
So, it’s a random, rainy night at Norm’s diner. Pie and coffee refills, droning TV as background noise, not a thing out of the ordinary, until. A bottle of Cholula hot sauce is heading for the floor and the door is flung open to reveal a crazy looking bum type, who, yes, immediately begins ranting nonsense to the patrons. And why would any of these good people not call the cops, or attempt to talk to and/or take him down? Because ranter Man claims he’s wired up for a very big BOOM should anyone mess with him, and with his thumb kept on the trigger at all times, no-one can really take that risk. So it’s back to semi-listening to his crazy talk, which starts sounding a bit less than insane when Future Man starts naming various diner patrons, and spouting off less-than-random facts about previous attempts made before.
Previous attempts of what, you ask? The world is in a crisis of phone blindness already, sure, but Future Man claims the evil Artificial Intelligence that ruins the world of his future is to be born quite soon, in a house some ways away from Norm’s actually, and he and his rag-tag gang from the diner folk have tried to stop it more than 100 times before. Regardless of what number attempt this is, we need to select this rounds’ patrons and get going, because of course the waitress called the cops. And while we’re trying to decide which escape method is the least likely to result in multiple deaths, we’re subject to relevant backstory vignettes. Onward we go!
First up is the story of the teacher couple Janet (Zazie Beets) and Mark (Michael Peña), and Mark’s first day as a substitute in Janet’s high school. Mark is very anxious, like to the point of panic attack anxious, and that was before he even got into a classroom, and the way fellow teachers refer to their missing brethren as having gone “on sabbatical” does nothing at all to alleviate his concerns. Janet can only tell him he’s overreacting so much, and when Mark mistakenly makes a sacrilegious move towards a students phone, it causes a great wave of zombified consequences in response, like something right out of a horror show. The fact that a colleague’s homemade “jammers” actually work is a weirdly coincidental but helpful thing.
Then we have poor double-damned Susan (Juno Temple) and her dear departed son Darren (Riccardo Drayton). Susan so desperately wants her son back from deaths grip that she somehow pays for a clone of the boy to be made, and nothing but distress follows when the boy acts … strangely. On the strength of yet another very-odd suggestion, Susan is introduced to a terribly different kind of service for Darren: an AI deadbot that, in theory, more closely resembles her beloved dead son. With only, y’know, the occasional commercial and ad product placement thrown in. And also apparently prophecy, when the deadbot tells mom to follow the man in the diner.
And then there’s Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), she of the soiled princess and melting eyeliner look, cursed from birth with allergies to, wait for it, electronic devices and WI-FI. Poor thing gets a bad nosebleed anytime she’s confronted with cellphones, and now they are literally everywhere, so what is a working girl to do? Where can a perfectly capable woman find work, where she’s not absolutely surrounded by electronics and cellphones every minute of every freaking day? If you chose “generic Princess-type delivering the cake at little-girl birthday parties” as your answer, I am suitably impressed. But kids are demanding phones at younger and younger ages these days, and a Princess dripping blood from her nose onto your birthday cake is not a desired thing, so Ingrid is off to her partner Tim at home. Tim (Tom Taylor), the guy who swore he didn’t need those electronic distractions or a cellphone, he was just happy to be with Ingrid, who is now rapidly obsessing over a virtual reality he was somehow introduced to. Tim, the guy who informs Ingrid not only is he leaving her, oh no honey, he’s leaving this entire reality for the virtual-ness of his newfound life, which is way better than reality could ever be. Reallytho.
What do all these strange, electronic-related reality-damning stories, have to do with the ranting Man from the Future in the diner? Well, in his future the evil AI has taken over everything, causing the youngling version of Future Man and his beloved mother to hide underground while the sunless post-apoc world outside rots. And despite being well aware of the consequences of getting caught, the call of technology and convenience is far too strong; the younger are more easily corrupted than the elder. Here in the current-attempt present, Future Man has a “security protocol” on a USB drive he needs to install in the fledgling AI before it goes fully online, and that means confronting the 9-year-old boy (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) who created it in the first place. A childs’ imagination is a terrifying thing, full of potentiality and damn near unlimited resources, where everything is overexaggerated and has world-ending consequences, so the different waves of opposition sent against Future Man and his diner allies range from the slapstick slasher-ific to the outright hilariously murderous.
Decide what you would do differently to save the future, and watch Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, available for streaming purchase on Amazon Prime and AppleTV now!
Reviewed by Alicia Glass