"Good Fortune" Review

 Comedian Aziz Ansari makes his feature directorial debut with Good Fortune, a sweet-natured comedy that he also wrote.

He stars as Arj, a wannabe documentarian stuck working gig economy jobs in LA. Also working a low-prestige job is Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a guardian angel whose job is to protect people from texting while driving. One day, he takes an interest in Arj after saving him and follows his life, working at a big box hardware store (think Home Depot), doing gig work, while living in his car.

One day while delivering food to a mansion owned by Jeff (Seth Rogan), he notices the garage is cluttered and offers to organize it for some extra cash. He does such a good job that Jeff offers him a job as his assistant, giving him a company credit card for expenses.

When Arj has a date with Elena (Keke Palmer), a woman he works with at the hardware store, Jeff suggests he take her to a trendy restaurant and recommends menu items. Naturally, when the bill comes it's waaaay more than what Arj has on him, so he reluctantly uses Jeff's credit card to cover dinner. The next day, Jeff confronts Arj about it after being alerted by his accountant. Arj apologizes profusely and promises to pay him back, but Jeff fires him because all the good work he was doing mattered little compared to a few hundred dollar dinner bill and besides those $250,000 watches he collects don't pay for themselves.

Back on the street, forced from the motel he was able to stay at while working for Jeff, Arj discovers he has been banned from the gig app he was using due to poor reviews by ungrateful customers and has to sell plasma for money. When he dozes off in a Denny's, his car is towed for unpaid parking tickets. Seeing Arj's desperation and wanting to make more of a difference in humans lives than just babysitting texting drivers, Gabriel reveals himself to Arj to try and inspire him.

In order to convince him that wealth won't solve his problems, he switches Arj's and Jeff's lives making Arj the wealthy tech investor and Jeff his assistant. Unfortunately for his plan, Arj finds that money pretty much solves all his problems. Making matters worse, Gabriel's angel boss, Martha (Sandra Oh), takes his wings and some of his angel powers for his meddling in matters outside his brief. When Arj refuses to switch lives back, Gabriel gives Jeff his memories back revealing what had been taken from him.

From there things spiral as Arj gets into an auto accident because no angel was there to prevent him texting, ending up in a coma, then pretending to have lost his memory to prevent switching back. Fed up, Martha turns Gabriel human which leads to him having to find a job to buy food he now needs while he and Jeff struggle to scrape by in LA's brutal cost of living. And Raj's wealth doesn't impress Elena whose passion is unionizing the hardware store.

What Ansari wisely does is not make the struggles of gig workers versus mansion-dwelling elites into a ham-fisted screed about late-stage capitalism - other than one clanger line at the end - because no one wants to be lectured by a Hollywood celebrity. Instead he sketches things by showing Arj getting one-star from a client who was mad that the donut shop Arj waited in line for hours to purchase from ran out through no fault of his. (It's like stiffing your waitress on the tip because the kitchen made a bad plate.) Elena's quest to unionize the workers doesn't go as well as she'd hoped. Arj learns to move forward without money.

He also takes a more laid-back pace in his direction, letting scenes breathe to allow character moments either than hammering joke-joke-joke. Rogan pretty much plays his a-hole studio boss character from The Studio, but Ansari and Palmer are more toned down then their noisy comic personas. Reeves is an actor of, to be kind, limited range, but it works to his advantage here because he brings an earnest childlike innocence to Gabriel, especially when he's turned human and washing dishes at a restaurant. Human life is alien to him and he plays it straight.

While not a laugh riot, Good Fortune is a pleasant, often amusing, sweet comedy which doesn't just go for cheap cruel humor or spoil it with agitprop. It's too bad it flopped at the box office, but who goes to the movies for stuff like this anymore?

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.