2025 - GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON'T DIE, amusing science fiction comedy

A time traveler from the future (where else) arrives at a diner in Los Angeles to save the planet earth.  He believes that some of the customers at the diner can help even though this is his 117 attempt at averting disaster.  What is exactly menacing earth?  Well Apple cell phones and AI of course.

This is an entertaining film coming from a very quirky filmmaker Gore Verbinski.  Verbinski had some big hits with his horror film The Ring and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films aka "the good ones."  The writer Matthew Robinson is an equally quirky guy.  He's written The Invention of Lying and Love and Monsters.  Unsurprisingly this is one odd ball of a film.

 

The cast is odd as well particularly Sam Rockwell as the man from the feature and Haley Lu Richadson whose job is to dress up as a sort of Disney princess to entertain little girls at birthday parties.  In a key plot point she has an allergy to cell phones.

 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is an eccentric film that the studio dumped with a release in February.  Nobody at the studio clearly knew how to market it.  What a disappointment, this film really deserved to be seen by an audience. Hopefully it will be rediscovered in the streaming world.

 The running time is 134 minutes. 

2013 - THE LONE RANGER, another revisionist western

 Somewhere in this mess of a movie is a decent film trying to get out.   White guy Johnny Depp, apparently wanting to add another off beat character to his resume is Tonto.  Disgraced actor Armie  Hammer is The Lone Ranger.  The white horse Silver does make an appearance and there are silver bullets involved.  That's about it for the legend of The Lone Ranger.

The film has so many subplots and for want of a better word, stuff going on that after a while it is almost impossible to track what is going on and who is doing what to whom.

The film wants to be a comedy, then takes a turn as a violent western almost like Peckinpah.  At some point the film is about the plight of the Native Americans and how they are victimized by the United States Army.  Then the film decides it wants to go down some sort of supernatural story line with The Lone Ranger and Tonto having visions about their futures. Moving along we have a plot involving the building of the transcontinental railroad and finally there is a love story between The Lone Ranger and his late brother's wife.

 

Obviously the screenplay is really the chief problem here.  There are at least three writers (Jusine Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio), that I know about involved in this mess and I would suspect probably more that I don't know about.  

I'm a little surprised this film is so messed up.  The producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the director Gore Verbinski are experienced commercial filmmakers.  It 's hard to believe they didn't see the problems with this film.

 

Anything to recommend it?  Well the action scenes are generally well done.  The film has some nice scenery of the Southwestern United States and it's fun to hear the William Tell Overture played over the action climax.

Running time an incredible 149 minutes.  I guarantee there will be no sequels to this film.