At The Movies
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a loopy anti-tech satire, Balls Up will dumb you down
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Sam Rockwell in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION
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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (M18)
134 minutes, opens on April 23
★★★☆☆
The story: An unnamed time traveller (Sam Rockwell) from the future crashes into a Los Angeles diner, demanding volunteers for his crusade to avert tech-pocalypse. He could very well be insane, except he knows the customers – because this is his 117th attempt.
Moviegoers of a certain age will fondly remember Gore Verbinski for Mouse Hunt (1997), Rango (2011) and the Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy (2003 to 2007).
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is the American director’s first feature in a decade, with Rockwell a manic companion for his brand of elastic lunacy.
Here is Rockwell’s ranting prophet, wired with explosives.
He succeeds in scaring up seven ragtag recruits.
They include a schoolteacher couple (Zazie Beetz and Michael Pena) terrorised by cellphone-zombified students, a bereft mother (Juno Temple) with a deadbot of her late son, and a depressed millennial (Haley Lu Richardson) allergic to Wi-Fi.
Every one of them has a motivation for turning Luddite revolutionary.
Sam Rockwell in Good Luck, Have Fun,
PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION
Their individual Black Mirror-esque backstories are spliced into their frantic, occasionally fatal night-long race, fending off cops and crazies to stop the fruition of an artificial superintelligence.
Should they fail, Rockwell’s doomsayer warns, half the population will die, while the other half are too busy doomscrolling in bed to notice: all the people these days, choosing the comforting oblivion of AI over the messiness of life.
Not Verbinski. His dark comic satire is over-long, chaotic and weird, with handmade idiosyncrasies – like a giant monster cat – as only a Verbinski creation can be. It is wacky yet deadly serious in both his anger at society’s self-destruction and his passion for humanity.
Hot take: No AI tool could ever contrive the loopy inventiveness of Verbinski’s anti-tech treatise.
Balls Up (M18)
Mark Wahlberg (right) and Paul Walter Hauser in Balls Up.
PHOTO: PRIME VIDEO
104 minutes, available on Prime Video
★★☆☆☆
The story: American marketeers Brad (Mark Wahlberg) and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser) are in Brazil to pitch a World Cup sponsorship and desperate to make it home alive after inciting an international incident.
Canada, Mexico and the United States are the host nations of the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicking off in June, not Brazil.
Balls Up is fiction. The Prime Video production is, to be exact, a laugh-free buddy comedy too second-hand to even offend, despite the director being Peter Farrelly of the ribald riots Dumb And Dumber (1994) and There’s Something About Mary (1998) – and, hence, the balls in the title referring not exclusively to the beautiful game: A “full-coverage” condom is the product Brad and Elijah are promoting as FIFA’s official prophylactics.
Brad is the blowhard salesman not as smart as he thinks, and Wahlberg has deadpan comic timing deflating his tough-guy image.
Elijah is the designer every bit the dimwit he looks, his idiotic shenanigans at the Brazil-Argentina final in Rio de Janeiro the cause of the biggest upset in football history.
Mark Wahlberg (left) and Paul Walter Hauser in Balls Up.
PHOTO: PRIME VIDEO
The bumbling duo find themselves on the run from an angry nation, a coked-up alligator, homicidal eco-warriors and Sacha Baron Cohen in an extended cameo as a cartel kingpin with a Borat (2006) accent and Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen for a sister.
At some point in the Amazon jungle, a parasitic fish swims up Brad’s urine stream, straight to his genitalia.
That is as memorable as it gets in a misadventure of crass cultural stereotypes and rote juvenile slapstick.
Hot take: The lo-jinks are dumb and dumber in a tedious farce.
