He is there, while customers sip coffee and bite into an omelet, to enlist recruits for the resistance. In the future, he says, people have entirely stopped participating in life. "It all started with morning phone time," he says. In the enjoyably oddball, forebodingly bleak and ridiculously plausible Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, a ragtag group fights a coming AI apocalypse across a handful of nondescript West Hollywood blocks.
The story kicks off in a diner when a man claiming to be from the future barges in with a detonator and a warning about an impending AI-fueled doom spiral - and from there, it only gets weirder. Richardson says she tore through the script in one sitting. "My agent said, 'Haley, there's a good script. We want you to do it,' which is rare," she explains. "And then I read it all in one sitting... which is also rare."
Gore Verbinski's bombastic return to the big screen starts with a bang - well, more accurately, a trickle. It's not easy to forget that this is the same man who delivered three gonzo Pirates of the Caribbean movies when his mysterious protagonist (Sam Rockwell) storms into a diner in the heart of Los Angeles, swathed in a plastic raincoat and covered in a series of tubes and wires... one of which empties a splash of urine onto the linoleum.