As evidenced by a robust sampling of films over the past few months, the bulking battleship that is Hollywood seems to have finally caught up with the headlines that artificial intelligence has been producing over the past few years. Tom Cruise stopped an AI program called the Entity from initiating nuclear armageddon in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Chris Pratt had to prove his innocence to Rebecca Ferguson's AI Judge Maddox in Mercy, and Jason Statham was framed and hunted down by his own government after an AI surveillance program went rogue in Shelter. Even at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Oscar-winning documentarian Daniel Roher tackles both sides of the coin in the aptly titled The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.

Between these grand theatrics and matter-of-fact stories, the unlimited potential of artificial intelligence has become inescapable, its demeanor seemingly a reflection of its creator. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, the first film from director Gore Verbinski in a decade, falls right in line with those previously mentioned blockbusters. But just as its title suggests, its warnings about the grave dangers of this awesome superweapon are served with a wink and a smile. You just have to remember not to die.

For The Man From the Future (Sam Rockwell), that last bit of instruction hasn't come easy, having nearly met his maker on several hundred occasions. His improbable luck comes from the time loop device strapped to his body, which inconveniently makes him look like a suicide bomber. His scraggly beard, haggard rainsuit, and wily demeanor also don't help his marketability when he enters a present-day Los Angeles diner looking to recruit people for his world-saving mission. Inside that diner are people looking down at their phones, oblivious to the fact that the world is teetering on the edge of the apocalypse. The Man's future has been overthrown by artificial intelligence thanks to humanity's inability to use caution on the slippery slope of technological progress. Just down the road from this diner, a computer prodigy is creating that AI program, and The Man has been sending himself back in time to stop that from happening, hoping to recruit the correct combination of strangers to aid him.

Matthew Robinson's script is entirely in service of Rockwell's extreme charisma in this opening setpiece. Pages upon pages of exposition are dumped on us and the diner's patrons, all of it serving as a grave warning for both the fictional and real-life world. This is the 117th time The Man has performed this song and dance, the constant failure wearing him down to just going through the motions. Rockwell more or less choreographs his movements like a dance, balleting upon tables, twirling through the barstools, and precisely hitting the cues he's memorized from repetition. It's a bit of old-school Hollywood showmanship, Rockwell's infectious spirit being just convincing enough for some people to buy into his ludicrous mission.

A conflict forms here, which continues throughout the film, between the performances of the highly qualified cast and the words they've been paid to recite. The Man's criticisms and prophecies about modern society are all valid, but that doesn't automatically make them compelling to hear. It seems to stem from an older man who has slowly become out-of-touch, always having something to say about "kids these days" and that we need to go back to the way things were. Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña play a couple of teachers that The Man recruits. In an extended flashback explaining how they got to be at the diner at that exact moment, they teach at a high school to students who are "barely people." Phone addiction and a narcissistic attitude run rampant in the classrooms, leading to teacher shortages and weekly school shootings. The mothers of the slain kids treat it as a minor inconvenience, with one treating her fourth dead kid as if it were the fourth time her goldfish died.

Flashbacks are also given to Juno Temple as the seemingly only rational parent of a dead child, and Haley Lu Richardson as a young woman who was literally born with an allergy to cell phone and internet signals. She falls for a man who willingly rejects technology, their love portrayed as being more pure. Running an almost unforgiveable 134-minutes, nearly half of the film is spent on the past actions of each individual supporting cast member, bloated filler taking away from the far superior zaniness Rockwell supplies in the main storyline.

That length isn't a surprise for Verbinksi, the filmmaker who pleasantly pushed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films towards the three-hour mark, and then unpleasantly stretched The Lone Ranger and A Cure For Wellness to two and a half hours. But what Verbinski lacks in brevity, he always makes up for it with ingenuity. The lack of financial resources doesn't hinder his ability to create moments of visual splendor; a well-timed camera move or edit is all that's needed to raise the stakes. Its scattershot energy feels reminicent to Everything Everywhere All at Once, the pieces of the puzzle not coming together as neatly as they should.

This very much feels like it has all the elements of a cult movie, with its devoted followers seeing themselves in the random strangers that join the fight alongside The Man, and the rest of us being the other ambivalent diner patrons who just want to tune out all that's bad in the world. Unfortunately, judging by this film's timeline, we may not be around for the necessary amount of years it takes for a cult status to form. In the meantime: good luck, have fun, and don't die.