Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 7/11/2026

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Gore Verbinksi is a filmmaker I enjoy. I, like most of the world, became aware of him with his first Pirates of the Caribbean film which he followed up with his pair of sequels. Ever since, from The Weather Man to Rango to his gonzo masterpiece A Cure for Wellness, I've wanted more Gore Verbinski movies. Heck, even The Lone Ranger, as bloated and unwieldy as it is, has some real entertainment to it.

But, the dual financial failures of The Lone Ranger and A Cure for Wellness seems to have sent him to director jail, and he had to spend nine years scrounging for projects and enough money to put something together. And that something came out earlier this year, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.

I missed it in theaters. I watched it the second I saw it on HULU. I bought the 4K at full price. I liked it. I enjoyed it. And, I had thoughts about it. Not really about the film itself, but about the nature of influence. Because, you see, I saw an influence, and that influence might not have actually been there.

Influence

Only the most naive of filmgoer assumes it's possible to make something completely original. Influence is going to percolate across every aspect of storytelling, and it's a question I'm interested in about when is it good or bad? And, watching Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, I saw a film that exhibited several different levels of influence from obvious references to structural decisions that I felt were hallmarks of earlier films.

But, first, why? Why use these influences?

The need to use influence comes from a few different places, but many times it's about solving narrative issues. You have a character in a screenplay who is doing things, but you don't buy that he's doing things for a convincing reason, so you reach back into your memory of films that you like, and you say, "My character should be like this character who was in a similar situation." Should the author reject an idea because it came before, or should they use it because it came before and worked well before? What idea hasn't come before? It's a miasma of questions about what should or shouldn't happen when creating something new.

References


The movie makes several overt references to other films. In the opening ten minutes, Sam Rockwell's future traveler character mentions Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray film about a man stuck in a small town, often visiting a diner, as he relives the same day over and over again. In this film, Rockwell is playing a character who is revisiting this diner for the one hundred seventeenth time, so the comparison is obvious for anyone with a modicum of film knowledge. So, the writer, Matthew Robinson, and Verbinski have Rockwell name drop the other film as if to indicate that yes, these are similar, yes, they know, and now it's time to move on.

They also name drop Mars Attacks!, the Tim Burton film when a minor character reveals he's created weapons that attack phones, bricking them and making them inert. Michael Pena's character compares the look of the guns to those from the aliens in Mars Attacks!. Why do that? Well, that could be as simple as Verbinski liked the design of the prop his prop guy came up with, saw the comparison himself, and thought it would be fun to insert as a line of dialogue.

A third movie mentioned is actually a novel, Anna Karenina, and this is the most interesting. Firstly, the movie does get mentioned (it's called ancient and stars Kiera Knightley whom Verbinski directed in the Pirates films, so there's a knowing nod to Verbinski's own film history there). Secondly, Pena's character spends thirty to sixty seconds on the necessity to read the book. It's a weird little detour (emphasis on little, the film is over two hours long) , but it has to serve some purpose, right? Anna herself becomes a character? The book is used as a door stop? Leo Tolstoy comes back from the dead and fights the AI at the end? Something?

Well, the use of it is something more subtle and interesting. Anna Karenina has a parallel character in the film. This would be the Haley Lu Richardson character, Ingrid. She has a love who leaves her for something else (this time, it's an AI existence), and she's despondent and decides that she can throw everything she has away that fateful night. It's not exactly throwing oneself in front of a train, but it is throwing oneself into danger because she feels like she has nothing else.

Do you need knowledge of Tolstoy's film to get Ingrid? To understand what she's going through? Not at all. Could the film have excised the Karenina reference completely? Yes. So, why put it in there? Well, as a signal to the audience of what's to come. It's a writer's convention about foreshadowing, and I thought this was interesting.

The Next Level


The next level of influence never gets mentioned directly in the film. These are the stories that came before that helped pave the path forward for narrative issues as well as narrative goals. The character issue I mentioned earlier? Verbinski felt like there was that exact issue in the script he signed on to direct from Robinson, so during rewrites he zeroed in on a solution.

The solution was Dog Day Afternoon. This isn't a guess. Verbinski mentions it in almost every interview he's done about the film. The character played by Rockwell needed a personal reason to go through this adventure with a group of misfits, much like Pacino in the earlier film, so Verbinski settled on Pacino's character as a model for how to write the story for Rockwell. Rockwell ends up with a personal connection to it all instead of just being Future Man.

The other major influence that the writer Matthew Robinson talks about is Akira, the late 80s, foundational anime film set in a futuristic Tokyo with lots of weird sights and sounds and an expansively epic ending. Robinson wanted the ending of his film to have a similar flavor, so he wrote in the same direction that Akira had gone. The ending is not the same. Our main character doesn't morph and balloon into a skyscraper sized behemoth, but there is an emphasis on scale and activity that mirrors what Akira had done previously.

My Theory


Watching Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die for the first time, I knew of one major influence that had to be there. There was no question in my mind. A group of people who are in a desperate situation, faced with a life or death mission, having to traverse a series of dangerous obstacles that pick them off one by one...AND we have extended flashbacks to give us a portrait of who they were before they showed up in that diner?

That's Sorcerer. To a T (except Friedkin's earlier film front-loads all of the flashbacks to be the first half of the film where Good Luck spaces them out through the first two-thirds of the film). It had to be that.

And neither Robinson nor Verbisnki have ever mentioned it as an influence. Not once. Robinson talks about Pulp Fiction's use of anthology as an influence, which fits with the film as well. But, nope, the obvious influence I KNEW was there...might not be?

What could explain that? Well, first of all, I could have just seen an influence that wasn't there. I could be outright wrong.

Or, it could be one level deeper. Quentin Tarantino considers William Friedkin's Sorcerer to be one of the greatest movies ever (he has a top 12, apparently). Could Sorcerer have influenced Pulp Fiction which then influenced Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die? Easily. That sort of thing happens all the time. Is that the right read of the situation? Maybe. It's just a fun little thought exercise, and no more, though.

Conclusion


Well, firstly, I recommend Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. It's fun. It wears its influences on its sleeves. It's not the most original thing ever, but it's well directed, well acted, well produced sci-fi fun.

Secondly, I find the influence game an amusing exercise, but I don't think it reflects on the qualities of the films themselves. TS Eliot wrote that bad poets borrow and great poets steal. Pauline Kael remarked at how she could see all the history of American cinema out in the open in a film she loved, Robert Altman's Nashville. Originality ends up being mostly about influences that you are not previously aware of.

Imagine back to 1999 when The Matrix came out. You'd never seen Ghost in the Shell. You'd never read Neuromancer. So, you'd never seen or read anything like it, and it felt like a breath of fresh air in no small part because it felt so original. But...it's actually fairly derivative of works you simply weren't previously aware of. Did the originality make The Matrix good? What if it wasn't actually original? Is it still good? I think so.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Evil Dead Burn

Moana

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Kiss of the Vampire (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "There's energy, and overall a strong sense of tone and mood to provide a feeling of unease that feels very appropriate for the horror genre. I think the film is a bit of a mess, but it's honestly a fun little mess." [YouTube]

Maniac (Rating 2/4) Full Review "It's just…I'm never quite sure what the story is. It can't commit to any of it all that well, and it's all weirdly deflating." [YouTube]

The Scarlet Blade (or, The Crimson Blade) (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "I want either a straight drama from this or a pure swashbuckling adventure. The film was ready to present either, so I got this muddled mix. However, it's an interesting muddled mix." [YouTube">YouTube]

The Devil-Ship Pirates (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "It's a bit disappointing, but I've been more disappointed by Hammer than this. A lot more." [Library]

The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "The movie is a largely limp affair as it languidly moves from one minor plot thread to the next until the incoherence of its final act takes over." [Hoopla]

The Evil of Frankenstein (Rating 1/4) Full Review "Honestly, that's meager. This is not a good film." [Library]

The Brigand of Kandahar (Rating 2/4) Full Review "A lot of very little things that don't really combine into a whole package. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call it bad, but, it's mostly because everything is just so unremarkable." [Library]

She (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "Is it good? Not really, but I do think the finale gets us surprisingly close. A better lead up to that ending would have really helped the film, but that's not there." [Library]

Please check out my videos from the last few weeks:

John Frankenheimer: The Directors Series
William Friedkin: The Definitive Ranking
William Friedkin: The Directors Series
Terrence Malick: The Definitive Ranking
Terrence Malick: The Directors Series
Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 8/1.