cAziz Ansari’s “Good Fortune” feels engineered around the personality of one of its stars: the wonderful Keanu Reeves. We’ve all heard the stories about how humble and kind Reeves is in real life, avoiding the trappings of celebrity living that he could have been a part of for almost four decades now. Gentle, sweet, and genuinely kind, his character in this inconsistent comedy is a joy, the main reason to see this riff on “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the gig economy. Ansari struggles as a writer when he tries to make the movie into a commentary on the widening economic rift of the 2020s, and he truly rushes the ending in a way that feels a bit unearned, but there’s so much to like about the four stars of this movie that it’s a really tough flick to hate. Kind of like Keanu Reeves.
The star of “The Matrix” plays Gabriel, a low-level angel whose assignment is “Texting and Driving.” If you’ve ever texted or surfed on your phone and suddenly looked up just in time to avoid a collision, that was Gabriel. His boss on the angel beat isn’t God himself but Martha (Sandra Oh), who encourages him to keep doing his job well and he’ll climb the ladder. It turns out there’s a hierarchy in Heaven too. Gabriel’s wings aren’t even as big as Martha’s.
This cut-rate Clarence becomes fascinated by Arj (Ansari), a guy who’s really struggling with multiple jobs that don’t even provide enough money to get him out of living in his car. He delivers food to ungrateful jerks for a company called Foodster, does odd jobs for an app that makes him do various tasks like stand in line to pick up the latest tasty treat, and works at a big box store called Hardware Heaven. That’s where he meets the charming Elena (Keke Palmer, always magnetic), who is fighting to form a work union that Arj can’t find the time to care about. Meanwhile, the task app job brings him into the life of a venture capitalist named Jeff (Seth Rogen), who agrees to hire him for a week as his personal assistant. When Arj makes a decision that irritates Jeff, he gets fired, and Gabriel worries that this kind guy might end up taking his own life.
Gabriel decides to show himself to Arj, first doing the angel thing of arguing for hope. In one of the film’s funniest segments, Arj sees visions of his future that include peeing in a bottle on an Amazon-esque job, living with in-laws, and being unable to afford medical bills for a pet. Gabriel means well, but Arj isn’t exactly empowered by the visions of what’s ahead. Thinking, in a very Keanu way, that Arj might learn that money doesn’t buy happiness, he switches his place with Jeff in the world. The rich man becomes poor; the poor man becomes rich. At the end of the week, when Gabriel expects Arj to go back to his old life, he refuses. And then things get really weird.
“Good Fortune” is largely a vehicle for the comedic charm of its cast, and not just Reeves. Ansari wrote himself a role that feels of a piece with his characters on “Parks and Recreation” and “Master of None,” and his comic timing is still strong. Palmer is charming every time, and that’s certainly the case here, even if she doesn’t exactly have enough chemistry with Ansari. Rogen is typically great, selling the arc of a rich guy who learns how the other side lives the hard way.
But the movie is really stolen by Reeves. For how fully he mishandles the situation, Gabriel is demoted to humanity, where he gets to learn his own lessons about what makes people tick. He tries a cheeseburger & milkshake for the first time, he gets a job washing dishes, he ends up chain smoking—watching the puppy dog countenance of Reeves go from angelic to toughened by the world is a joy. Although even that arc gets kind of abruptly discarded in a rushed final act. It feels like Ansari came up with a great idea before really figuring where he was going to take it. Without spoiling, the final scenes feel a bit too soft for a movie that’s really about pretty hard stuff.
While some of the frustrating aspects of a directorial debut hamper the final product, there is a copious amount of empathy throughout “Good Fortune.” Roger’s famous quote about film being an empathy machine is kind of embedded in the plot if you think about it in that Jeff is allowed to literally step into the shoes of a life he’s never known—he got most of his money from his rich parents—and even the angel is given an emotional understanding of what it means to be human by becoming one. There’s a better film that truly digs into these ideas of how empathy can be altered by experience, but this one has a big enough heart that its little wings can still get it off the ground.
This review was filed from the premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It opens on October 17, 2025.
