Review: Good Fortune

You can tell Aziz Ansari is a guy who’s seen It’s a Wonderful Life, Trading Places, Wings of Desire, and maybe half an episode of Undercover Boss. His directorial debut, Good Fortune, is a fable for the gig economy, a modern morality play where angels wear hoodies, billionaires learn humility, and down-on-their-luck strivers get the chance to experience just how good the other half lives. If that all sounds a little too tidy, that’s because it is. The movie means well. It even tries hard.

Ansari casts himself as Arj, a freelance documentary editor in Los Angeles who has slid straight off the payroll and into his car. He dashes around town delivering fast food to tech bros and standing in line for the latest foodie must-haves while crashing in a motel, unable to afford anything remotely stable. His meet-cute with Elena (Keke Palmer) at Hardware Heaven, introduces a rare spark of humanity to his otherwise demoralizing routine. She’s a retail worker agitating for union rights, and the movie briefly flirts with letting her be more than a symbol, but more on that later.

The plot kicks in when Arj crosses paths with Jeff (Seth Rogen), a venture capitalist in the Silicon Valley mold: rich, dorky, very disconnected from reality, and prone to hiring strangers off gig apps to organize his garage. One thing leads to another, and Arj lands a short-term gig as Jeff’s personal assistant, which, for a brief moment, makes him feel like his life might be heading somewhere other than the 24-hour diner down the street. But a minor misstep gets him unceremoniously fired, and Arj finds himself right back at square one, questioning whether any of this is worth it.

Enter Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a low-level angel with a very specific heavenly assignment: stop people from texting and driving. Gabriel is jealous of his celestial coworkers who get to save souls or protect world leaders; he’s just here to stop distracted driving, which, as the film grimly notes, has become a full-time gig. Watching Arj spiral, Gabriel breaks protocol, intervenes, and, in a moment of Capra-meets-Freaky Friday inspiration, lets Arj swap lives with Jeff.

Now it’s the poor man living in a mansion and the rich man scrambling to make rent, and Good Fortune settles into its biggest stretch of fun. Arj marvels at private chefs, fancy cars, and heated toilet seats. Jeff panics at the price of a night at a seedy motel. It’s all breezy enough until the movie remembers it has to say something important, and the air leaks out like a popped food delivery bag.

There’s a better film hidden somewhere inside Good Fortune, one that actually wrestles with the emotional toll of economic despair, and what it might really mean to experience someone else’s life. Instead, the film’s approach to class struggle is just a little too cute, its resolutions a little too convenient, its metaphors a little too on-the-nose. Elena’s union efforts are mostly a narrative prop, and the movie’s vision of poverty (peeing in a bottle at an Amazon-style job, living with in-laws, etc.) feels more like a Hollywood writer’s sketch than lived-in truth.

Still, for all its narrative fumbles, Good Fortune has one secret weapon: Keanu Reeves. As Gabriel, he glides through the movie with a kind of celestial goofiness, his wide-eyed joy at experiencing tacos, his genuine confusion at Earth’s many indignities. Watching Reeves smoke his first cigarette or flip burgers as a disgraced angel is its own kind of delight, a small miracle of performance in a film that otherwise struggles to find its footing. HIs comedic chemistry with Rogen makes me want them to star in a buddy movie as soon as possible.

Reeves isn’t just the heart of the movie, he’s the only character who seems to grow, or at least surprise. Ansari plays Arj with his usual jittery likability, and Rogen is comfortably in his “lovable man-child gets humbled” gear. Palmer brings fire to a role that doesn’t deserve her. But only Gabriel gets to undergo the kind of transformation the film pretends to offer its whole ensemble. The angel learns to love humanity by becoming human. Everyone else just kind of learns to cope.

Good Fortune wants to be a modern fable about empathy and income brackets. It wants to deliver a gentle sermon about the dignity of work and the hollowness of wealth. And it wants to make you laugh while doing it. Sometimes it succeeds. But more often, it feels like Ansari is trying to pull off a delicate balancing act, comedy, social critique, magical realism, without quite knowing where the tightrope ends. His heart’s in the right place. His script, less so.

In the end, Good Fortune doesn’t really deliver the kind of fortune, good or otherwise, that its title promises. It gives us Keanu Reeves in a halo. And honestly, that might be enough.

3/5