Written and Directed by Aziz Ansari | 97 min | ▲▲1/2
There’s a genuine novelty of a full-on comedy opening in cinemas in 2025, which is kind of a shame. There are so few of these. It’s also kind of a treat that Good Fortune’s fantasy scenario feels like it might be a delightful successor of great movies like It’s A Wonderful Life and Heaven Can Wait (both 1943 and 1978 versions). It is and it’s not — it’s a good time that forefronts issues in the US around the gig economy and the huge gap between the haves and have nots, but in its whimsy it doesn’t go quite deep enough.
No surprise Keanu Reeves once again shows he’s a legendary movie star and far away the MVP here. He’s a guardian angel, Gabriel (not that one), who doesn’t have a super-important job. He nudges drivers when they text so they don’t crash. He wants to have a job that means more, and complains to his supervisor, Martha (a terrific cameo from Sandra Oh). One of the small joys here are issues Gabriel bumps up against in the angelic bureaucracy.
He notices Arj (Ansari), an average guy who’s not having much professional luck — he does a few different jobs to help make ends meet, including working a hardware chain and delivering food, and lives in his car. He gets an opportunity to work as an assistant forJeff (Seth Rogan), a techbro who lives in a modernist Hollywood Hills mansion, but he makes a mistake with the company credit card and gets fired.
That’s when Gabriel comes in to Arj’s life. He switches Jeff’s life with Arj, convinced that Arj will learn the lesson that Jeff has real problems, too, and that will make Arj appreciate what he’s got. Turns out a mansion with a pool and not worrying about your next meal is a lot better than sleeping in your car.
This is all fun — this isn’t a laugh-out-loud comedy, but the charm of the leads is undeniable. Rogan’s harmless, likeable bro-y-ness is a defining aspect of his brand and it’s weaponized here. He and Ansari have terrific chemistry and you want to spend more time with just the two of them, but the movie pulls them apart too often.
Probably the best bits have to do with Gabriel who, having messed things up with Arj and Jeff, loses his wings and his place among the heavenly host and has to go be an ordinary human. His discovery of human pleasures like tacos and smoking, as well as the crushing disappointment of working your ass off and getting a paycheque that doesn’t come near to compensating you for the effort you put in, those moments justify the price of the ticket.
This is also the rare comedy that looks really good — this is a genuine Los Angeles At Night movie, as much as Drive or Nightcrawler, all neon lit, wet-down streets, and moodiness.
What disappoints is what Ansari leaves on the table. The plot moves at a good clip, and a little over an hour and a half is a reasonable duration for this material, but the movie has so many good ideas it’s a shame what it doesn’t do. It makes clear to Jeff the tragedy of inequity as he has to live in Arj’s car, but he never gets really desperate. Ansari could linger in it all of this more, make his themes more explicit. This is clear in the last scene with Jeff, who doesn’t become a philanthropist with his millions, he just insists that food delivery drivers in his company should be better compensated. At the tail end of capitalism, that feels like the absolute least he could do, and it’s not nearly enough.
Then there’s Elena (Keke Palmer), Arj’s sometime colleague at the hardware chain who’s trying to unionize her workplace, but she remains a subplot and a romantic interest for Arj instead of a stronger element in the story. The movie ends up wanting us to believe life is worth living because of love and friendship, but it still feels like it wants everyone to learn to be happy with what they’ve got, even if the entire system is being gamed by the wealthy. Early on Arj says, “The American dream is dead,” so the movie needs him to change his mind in the year the United States is in danger of becoming a police state.
Good Fortune is also coming out in the shade of Aziz Ansari having done that comedy gig in Saudi Arabia last week. It’s a little hard to take seriously his movie’s theme around societal inequity when the storyteller goes for a huge payday by performing in a country that has an even more brutal record of human rights. Good fortune, indeed.
But if you’re gonna see it, go for the Canadians in the cast and the inherent goodness Keanu Reeves brings to his role. He lifts the movie around him with his tiny wings.
