A strangely old-fashioned supernatural comedy from Aziz Ansari, still probably best known for Parks and Recreation, who wrote, directed and stars in Good Fortune, a so-nearly-great feature debut falling over itself in its desire to pack everything in.
The opening shot of Keanu Reeves stood on top of a monumental building kitted out in angel’s wings suggests Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, but Ansari is really channelling Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch. It’s a Wonderful Life and Heaven Can Wait most obviously, though the social-democratic impulses of Mr Smith Goes to Washington are sloshing around in the drum too.
Reeves plays a low-status angel, Gabriel (not the billing Gabriel gets in the Bible, but there you go), a celestial being tasked with stopping people crashing their cars while texting. Chafing for more responsibility, Gabriel decides to get more proactive and intervene more substantially in human existence. He make a complete mess of it, accidentally swapping the lives of gig-economy-worker Arj (Ansari) with that of venture-capitalist Jeff (Seth Rogen).
Familiar body-swap amusement follows as one of the precariat and one of the one per cent sample life from the other side of the divide. Arj can’t believe his luck living the high life, while Jeff is slumming it out in the cold dark world most of us will recognise. Jeff is accompanied by Gabriel, who has been demoted for stepping beyond his pay grade.
On the one hand Arj learning how to enjoy champagne and cold plunges, on the other Jeff learning to sleep in the car. On yet another hand Gabriel getting the hang of eating, smoking, dancing and all the good stuff humans enjoy. And on still another hand Keke Palmer as Arj’s love interest. Or at least she is when he is a fellow drone. Once he’s been elevated to the super-rich bracket, Arj’s interest in her attempts to unionise the workplace – never highly developed in the first place – dwindles to zilch. And so does her interest in him. Boy loses girl.
That is a lot of hands and they do not make light work of what should be a frothy entertainment – and it is for the most part. At around the halfway mark the “people in a balloon” question starts to assert itself. Who should be jettisoned to give this film more buoyancy? It’s probably Keanu, sadly, though he’s hugely enjoyable as Gabriel, taking swipes at the Keanu image as “kind of a dum-dum”, as Gabriel puts it at one point. Because the movie is not really about him, or it shouldn’t be. Instead, rather cruelly, over the side of the basket goes Palmer, not that the romantic chemistry between her and Ansari was exactly zinging off the screen.
Ansari is also a stand-up and his observational jokes about modern life being rubbish are pretty good – the endless bullshit of everyday existence, like having to give every social interaction a star rating, being terrorised by non-compliant apps, being made redundant by the arrival of bots and AI, all summed up neatly by the sight of a delivery driver at Arj’s workplace being handed a pee bottle, because heaven forbid that anyone should take a break.
A move to unionise a workforce, when did you last see that in a movie? The cultural mood is obviously shifting and Ansari has caught a flavour of the same groundswell that saw democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s “shock” arrival as a contender for the mayorship of New York (which happened after this movie wrapped).
Good jokes, interesting politics, Keanu’s otherworldliness well used, Rogen and Palmer slightly hung out to dry. Nothing a light script-doctoring couldn’t fix. It’s not perfect in every respect but there are smarts and laughs in Good Fortune – a good movie with the bones of a great one.
Good Fortune – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
