You don’t have to like all of this films, but you can’t call Gore Verbinski a “lazy” filmmaker. In fact, the largest problem Verbinski runs into is that he doesn’t know when to reign anything in and has no interest in doing so, which usually leads to his often-fascinating ideas clouded in an unfocused structure. It happened with the Pirates sequels, A Cure For Wellness, and yes, even The Lone Ranger. But one thing that remains consistent with Verbinski is that his movies are purely human-made, no matter what size and budget. Every frame filled with genuine, lavish craft in service of a grand vision. He’s made a few of the most expensive films ever made, with visual effects that still look great today, and with crews that require thousands. Today, studios are doing anything they can to cut corners and budgets, to eliminate jobs and rush productions through the short cut of artificial intelligence. It makes perfect sense that Verbinski would take offense to that.

Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die hits the ground running almost instantly with the appearance of a dirty, scraggly, bearded Sam Rockwell, dressed in a plastic trench coat, and covered in tubes and wires like a suicide bomber. Alarming as his presence is, he strolls into a Los Angeles diner with no fear, looking to recruit six individuals to join him on a quest to stop the source of a rogue AI from destroying the world. He knows them all by name, and almost everything about them, because he has done this 116 times. This is his 117th time sending himself back in time to this exact moment. But every time he has sent himself back in time, he has changed the order of the patrons he takes with him, trying to find the correct set that won’t end in immediate death. For the 117th time, he chooses Mark (Michael Pena), Janet (Zazie Beetz), Susan (Juno Temple), Scott (Asim Chaudhry), Marie (Georgia Goodman), and begrudgingly, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson). Their mission: make it across the city to a house where the creator of the A.I. program resides and prevent their actions while on the run from a zombified hive-minded army whose minds are being controlled by their phones.

Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die is a thoroughly enjoyable midnight movie, equal parts Attack the Block meets Weapons in tone, and scathing with its pessimism towards the future we’re headed with artificial intelligence and with society as a whole. Flashback structure dominates much of the first half, gradually expanding the world we’re dropped into: one that would be right at home in a season of Black Mirror, reminiscent of the one we live in, though with a few extreme technological updates. Verbinski uses this vision of an alternate-version of our world to lampoon the morbid recurrence of gun violence and school shootings, subscription prices and cost of healthcare, and of course, screen time usage. As much as the flashbacks cause a stop-start effect to the pacing, Verbinski’s bleak world-building does a lot to flesh out these characters and understand why they’re compelled to stick with this oddball.

Rockwell feels perfectly at home with this eccentric role, being a highly enjoyable anchor for the audience. His opening scene alone is just pages of dialogue he rattles off without a breath between words and by the time we even get to the title drop, it’s believable enough that these strangers would give him a chance. The rest of the cast add a lot of personality to their roles, though it’s Richardson who gets the most to chew on, both emotionally and comedically.

Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die has a lot of gas in its tank, but by the time it gets to its climax, it’s unfortunate that it can’t wrap all of its gonzo bullet points into a cohesive, declarative, and fulfilling closure. In fact, the action gets so big that the narrative begins to lean on certain tropes that Verbinski should be well-past, leaving a lot of its more fascinating viewpoints introduced earlier on left hanging. The grand finale is underwhelms in being a tad conventional, as though Verbinksi had everything locked down except how to wrap this galaxy-brain plot up. What it’s trying to say with its final moments is devastating and yet poignant and heartfelt, but lacks the narrative build-up to make that final statement feel resonant, instead feeling rushed and muddled.

But for the first two-thirds, it’s a wonderfully loony time. An angry film saying all the right things and begging for the world to listen while enjoying itself as a cinematic satire. Perhaps as we continue down the dour path of increased artificial intelligence, job loss, poverty, and technological dependence, this film’s flaws will be forgiven over time. It may be made without restraint, but it is undeniably made by a human soul.