Flasz On Film

Synopsis: Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a restless guardian angel who swaps the lives of a struggling gig worker, Arj (Aziz Ansari), and a wealthy tech investor, Jeff (Seth Rogen), to teach that happiness isn’t found in wealth. But when Arj revels in his newfound privilege, Gabriel’s experiment spirals out of control—forcing both men to confront what truly gives life meaning. In the end, each discovers that hope and purpose come not from divine intervention, but from compassion and human connection. 

In 2022, Aziz Ansari (Master of None, Parks and Recreation) was supposed to direct his feature debut Being Mortal. However, the production ended up shutting down in the wake of a scandal involving allegations against its star, Bill Murray. Suffice it to say that there must have been very little appetite behind the scenes for recasting the movie and staging a do-over. Instead, Ansari decided to fast-track another idea he had stashed in his back pocket. And now we have the pleasure (or lack thereof) of witnessing the fruits of this labor.  

Let’s just say that as far as half-baked ideas go, Good Fortune really ticks all the boxes. Between a flimsy premise, undercooked screenwriting stacked to the rafters with flatlining comedy, direction that most assuredly amounted to telling Seth Rogen to just “do his thing” and a piece of thematic messaging that seemed timely and cool on paper but came across as totally tone-deaf, this movie is nothing but a festive parade of disappointment. At just over ninety minutes of screen time, it is actually a struggle to sit through this experience.  

I can only imagine that Ansari, Rogen and their other buddies came up with this movie almost as a you-know-what-would-be-cool kind of idea in the wee hours of the morning after a pool party full of booze and weed reached its natural climax. I can also plausibly assume that such an act of brainstorming involved joking about getting Keanu Reeves, the literal John Wick, to star in the movie, giving him tiny angel wings and asking him to do deadpan comedy in the style of Takeshi Kitano. I’m sure the plan was to make a hybrid between a Frank Capra movie and Kevin Smith’s Dogma, but about the gig economy and how terribly difficult it must be for people who don’t own pools and cannot afford to sit there and talk total nonsense in the middle of the night because they have packages to deliver and plastic bottles to urinate into. Oh, and can we make it about AI, too? It will totally make the movie timely and such.  

Well, all I can say is that hell is paved with good intentions and not every half-cooked idea is going to be a banger. Good Fortune is a great example that it’s almost never a good idea to give Keanu Reeves more than fifteen lines of dialogue. Bless him, but he’s never been capable of emoting in any appreciable way and it sure doesn’t look as though he’s mastered this concept for this occasion. Reeves’s comedic timing is its lack and all he does is what he has consistently delivered ever since Dracula in 1992. All he ever does in this movie is do battle with the lines he’s supposed to deliver. And it doesn’t help that the lines Ansari wrote for him are mediocre at best.  

In fact, the entire movie is just a collection of poorly conceptualized visual ideas where comedy is supposed to be extracted from a Capra-esque predicament in which Ansari’s character, an impoverished gig worker who sleeps in his car, trades places with a tech-bro and gets a taste of his opulent lifestyle… supposedly to learn a lesson about happiness. What the movie desperately tries to negate using a combination of embarrassingly unfunny comedy and undercooked plot devices is the sinking feeling that, after all, money does bring happiness by dint of making survival a non-issue. In what I can only assume is an attempt at Capra-esque fairy-tale magic, the movie stacked with characters that bear zero resemblance to real life ends up sermonizing that we should just magically be done with “that AI bullshit” and give people money or something. It’s just a notch above leaving the viewer with a message asking them to consider not being poor.  

There’s simply no way to boogie your way around the basket of glaring problems this movie arrives with and in fairness, it is impossible to like what transpires on the screen. Jokes don’t land, Reeves acts just like I’d imagine someone would behave when they are being tased by a small-town sheriff on a power trip, the romantic sublot comes and goes and really nothing ever adds up to an experience that would be meaningful or at least fundamentally entertaining. It’s just embarrassing. Tone-deaf and gross.  

Good Fortune looks like a movie that was conceived, written and storyboarded on a napkin and somehow carries a vibe of a movie you’d expect to have seen in 2014, like The Interview or This Is the End. I think kids these days would call it cringeworthy, but I’m not too sure. My slang game isn’t what it used to be and I’m not going to pretend I’m funky and cool like those guys who forced Keanu to wear a trench coat and tiny wings while reciting walls of text and nearly dying under the combined weight of his poorly timed deadpan. To sum up, Good Fortune is nothing but a clear-cut case of false advertising because, unfortunately, it is the polar opposite of good.