The review below was written by my son, Noah Davis.
This film is a curious surprise — Good Fortune might not make a fortune at the box office, but it’s one of those “under-the-radar” curiosities worth seeing just for how weirdly sincere it is. Written, directed, produced, and starring Aziz Ansari, the Master of None creator makes his big-screen leap and seems determined to prove he can handle redemption — both on-screen and off. The movie is uneven in parts, sure, but it’s buoyed by the wonderful Keanu Reeves, whose gentle decency gives this strange fable its soul.
Reeves plays Gabriel, a low-level angel whose heavenly assignment is “Texting and Driving.” Whenever someone looks up just in time to avoid a crash, that’s him. His boss in the celestial chain of command is Martha (Sandra Oh), a divine middle manager whose wings are a little bigger and whose job is to remind Gabriel to “keep improving.” Heaven, it turns out, has its own performance metrics. It’s a clever setup — a cosmic bureaucracy where grace operates on a quota system.
Down on Earth, Arj (Ansari) is a broke Angeleno sleeping in his car and bouncing between gig jobs — delivering overpriced meals for a company called Foodster, standing in lines for strangers through an app, and stocking shelves at Hardware Heaven, where he meets Elena (Keke Palmer), a lively worker trying to unionize while Arj just tries to survive. He’s a man caught in the middle: too busy to care, too tired to dream.
One errand lands Arj in the orbit of Jeff (Seth Rogen), a smug but affable venture capitalist who hires him for a week as his personal assistant — and fires him just as quickly after one mistake. Watching all this from above, Gabriel begins to worry that this kind man might be heading toward despair. Against orders, he intervenes. First, he tries the angelic route — visions of Arj’s possible futures: warehouse drudgery, couch-surfing with in-laws, a pet’s medical debt. It’s one of the film’s funniest stretches, bleak in its accuracy.
When pep talks fail, Gabriel tries something bigger. In a riff on Trading Places for the gig-economy age, he swaps Arj’s life with Jeff’s — the rich man becomes poor, the poor man rich. What begins as a heavenly experiment turns into a social satire with teeth. But when the week is over and Gabriel expects Arj to trade back, the new millionaire refuses. That’s when things start to get strange, and the film reveals its true idea: that in a world addicted to self-help, even angels can’t fix entitlement.
Ansari’s writing sometimes leans on the obvious, and the ending feels rushed, but the performances carry it. Reeves is pure light — the kind of actor who can make celestial bureaucracy feel tender. Palmer adds human warmth, and Rogen brings the right note of capitalist oblivion. It’s a parable about grace in a world of gig apps, kindness in an age of metrics, and whether morality can survive an HR department.
It’s not perfect, but it’s fascinating — a comedy that accidentally becomes a mirror. Sure, streaming changed the game — but so did the culture. The big-screen comedies that once united audiences depended on shared experiences that just don’t exist anymore. Good Fortune feels like an attempt to summon that lost chemistry, chasing the communal spark of the 2000s comedy era when everyone was able to laugh at the same thing.
