Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

What if Kyle Reese were a madman, and the Terminator an army of TikTok-obsessed teens? That’s the vibe of Gore Verbinski’s first film in a decade, wherein a manic Sam Rockwell runs into a diner and claims he’s come from the future to stop the apocalypse. What follows is messy, a little madcap, and at times depressingly realistic. It won’t reinvent the time-travel caper like James Cameron did, but there’s fun amid the mayhem.

Rockwell’s unnamed character knows that somewhere, in a non-descript LA eatery on an average evening, is the combination of people who are capable of defeating the AI that will soon bring about the end of the world — if only he can put the right team together. After more than a hundred iterations, he tries once more — but this gang, including bereaved mum Susan (Juno Temple) and terrorised teachers Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Mark (Michael Peña), just might have what it takes.

Screenwriter Matthew Robinson previously penned the likeably weird Dora And The Lost City Of Gold — also starring Peña — and an entertaining apocalyptic tale in 2020’s fun Love And Monsters. This isn’t as sure-handed as either, with so many ideas pinging around that it can’t always marshal them into a coherent plot, while there’s some heavy-handed signposting of a few twists and turns. The basic anti-AI thrust feels timely, but the details — cloning in one scene and TikTok anxiety in the next — are an odd mix of implausibly futuristic and boomer-coded. Criticising teens in particular for their phone usage is always regressive, however clever the zombie effect that Verbinski ultimately uses it for. And there’s barely a hint of corporate responsibility here: this AI future is a strictly homemade affair, as far as we can see.

That’s not to say that this lacks entertainment value. Verbinski’s horror background comes into play as he invents new versions of classic monsters, and Rockwell is immensely fun as the possibly insane leader of the mission. There’s no dancing, but otherwise this leans all the way into Rockwell’s strengths, giving him fast-paced dialogue and an irrepressible twinkle as well as deep and lasting trauma and twitchiness. The film’s extensive flashbacks, giving us context for a few characters, are interesting enough to suggest that this could have been an anthology TV show, but they stifle the mission’s momentum in favour of patchy world-building. It might have been better to fold the revelations into dialogue or flashback and focus more on the issue of Rockwell’s sanity or the many other questions the movie poses about how technology has changed our relationship with reality. The future already seems perilous, and fiction has to work hard to stand out.