Good Fortune chugs along on its effervescent cast and opening gambit until it runs out of gas. It is Trading Places meets John Travolta’s Michael meets love letter to LA meets screed against capitalism. Aziz Ansari’s return after a brief hiatus following claims of misconduct is most thrilling in the way that it reproaches the gig economy with wide-eyed, innocent disbelief, mostly through the eyes of Keanu Reeves’s Gabriel. The premise of Good Fortune is something like well-intentioned angel attempts to save a lost soul by revealing the dark side of wealth and excess only to find that a life of poverty has more drawbacks than it might seem.
The developments of the second act have to do with (spoilers) Gabriel being condemned to live the life of a human for his egregious error and failed attempts at convincing Arj and Jeff to switch places. A lot of the heavy lifting for the story seems to come from the frustrations of dating a socially-conscious and chronically underused Keke Palmer, who seems like she would dislike Arj’s selfish crab-bucket worldview regardless of if he were poor or rich.
Ansari’s humor is cutting, frustrated, and cradling a warm, earnest heart at its center at all times, which works for the most part until the final act, when as Friend easily pieced together during the credits, the movie should have concluded with the three friends sharing their wealth and living together happily with the memory of their time together, but instead ends with some hair-brained shoe-horn of a “we the little people gonna help each other out while we wait for the millionaires and billionaires to grow a conscious one board meeting at a time or else”.
