GOOD FORTUNE (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Good Fortune, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 17, 2025

Director/star Aziz Ansari's screenplay for Good Fortune keeps coming up with clever comedic potential. The payoff to those assorted ideas, though, is much rougher.

A few obvious things get in the way of the comedy's success. One of them is the absence of a central figure around whom to revolve the story and the humor. The script gives us three main characters, and each of them—all of them quite different—is focus of some stretch or sections of the narrative, and honestly, one of them is much funnier and more unique than the others.

That would be an angel named Gabriel, played by Keanu Reeves with such deadpan understatement that one might mistake his performance as an apathetic one. That becomes the joke of the character, really, in that he is bored as a supernatural being of great but, compared to his angelic colleagues, relatively limited power. In one of the smarter turns here, the character becomes more human as he is punished for making some choices outside of his job specifications. He barely experiences enough to start being excited by the prospect of being human before the boredom of the routine of a daily grind begins to, well, grind away at him in the mortal realm, too.

A story about this character and this predicament might have been a stronger one than what Ansari gives us. It is still funny and pointed about the ever-diminishing state of the economy and the job market for everyday people, to be sure. After giving us a divine presence of such specificity and with so many recognizable qualities, though, no other character could really stand next to Gabriel and seem more or even as interesting.

Ansari's character, a guy named Arj who is stuck in the gig economy, certainly isn't. He's a college graduate who, after years of apparently working jobs that pay less and have diminishing financial security, doesn't even bother to mention what his degree and his career dreams were. Working part time at a hardware store and spending the rest of his time doing assorted tasks on a couple service apps, Arj doesn't make enough for rent in Los Angeles and sleeps in his car.

Unlike Reeves' work, Ansari's performance here does come across as aloof, which is unfortunate since Arj is as close to a decidedly central protagonist as the movie possesses. The movie's premise, complications, and lesson depend on Arj's experiences, choices, and development, but perhaps, the actor has been spread too thin by his roles as screenwriter and director (The direction itself is fairly pedestrian, but it's not a visual comedy, at least).

The premise, by the way, has Gabriel, whose celestial intervention on Earth has him protecting people from accidents they might have had by looking at their cellphones while driving, deciding to intervene in a more significant way on Arj's behalf. The guy lands a dream job of sorts as an assistant to venture capitalist Jeff (Seth Rogen), who lives in a mansion and spends money without worrying about it. It's all going well, until Jeff suggests a "not too pricey" restaurant where Arj can take co-worker Elena (Keke Palmer) on a first date. Jeff and Arj's respective concepts of inexpensive, of course, are quite different, so when Arj uses a company credit card to pay the tab, Jeff fires him.

Gabriel's plan is, first, to show Arj that his life is worth living, which doesn't work out so well when the guy's future is still one of constantly struggling financially. The angel's second idea is to make Arj swap places with his former boss. Arj will have Jeff's life and, more importantly, wealth, and Gabriel hopes he'll see that being rich doesn't solve every problem.

Of course, money does solve Arj's most significant issues, and that little but potent twist on an old-fashioned morality play is ingenious enough for the movie to have something going for it. Arj keeps Jeff's life, because it's so much better than his own and no moral lesson is going to break through the practical fact that an exceedingly comfortable life feels better than one of financial insecurity.

From there, the narrative jumps around quite a bit, following Arj as he lives luxuriously and starts dating Elena, Jeff as he tries to adjust to Arj's life after the angel makes him conscious of his real and well-to-do one, and, having been turned human by his boss Martha (Sandra Oh), Gabriel as he also realizes that job washing dishes at a restaurant doesn't pay enough for a living. That the angel doesn't even have much a life in the first place, being completely new at being human, only drives the point more.

Some of this is funny. Much of it pierces as social satire in a way that makes one wish Ansari had taken it a step further. As much as the central theme is the desperation and despair caused by common economic woes, the ultimate lesson is so safe and sentimental that it feels dishonest by comparison.

A lot of it, however, is unnecessarily convoluted and unfocused on a story level, and that undermines the humor, the genuinely clever possibilities, and the bigger point of the movie. Good Fortune has a fantastic comedic premise, but its execution mostly leaves one hoping someone else might have another try at the conceit one day.

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