Good Fortune (2025, Aziz Ansari)

56/100

Honestly, I didn't even need the high-concept premise. Would happily have watched an entire movie about Seth Rogen as a blowhard finance bro and Aziz Ansari as his put-upon personal assistant. Just watching them riff about anything is a good time.

ROGEN: You got a hot date? What's the plan?
ANSARI: Eh, somethin' low-key. Prob'ly go get tacos.
ROGEN: Tacos?! What? Do you not like this girl?
ANSARI: Yeah I like this girl, do you not like tacos?
ROGEN: How did you guys meet each other?
ANSARI: Mmm...we kinda met at a taco place.
ROGEN: And you're goin' for more tacos?! That's too many tacos, man! That's an all-taco relationship.

His asking where they met arguably qualifies as a convenient non sequitur, but I'll allow it because well-structured comic exchanges like this have become dispiritingly rare (in movies, anyway). Act one's replete with character/personality-driven badinage (Keke Palmer's also on hand) and light observational gig-economy humor—nothing special, but consistently funny enough to keep me watching. And then when Keanu shows up as an inept guardian angel, Good Fortune shifts into what could (and really should) have been a dynamite subversion of switcheroo fantasies, with Ansari's poor schlub getting a taste of the good life and learning absolutely nothing except that his actual existence was dogshit and he never ever wants to go back. (Basically the performance starts out Likeable Everyman and then abruptly turns into Tom from Parks and Rec.) Now's the perfect time for a movie about the near-impossibility of persuading a magical lotto winner to accept being meek in return for a promise of future Earth inheritance. Instead, Ansari inexplicably puts his own character in a coma for a while and devotes most of the film's weaker second half to reheating Dan Aykroyd's scenes in Trading Places (with valuable life lessons now in fact learned), plus reheating Wings of Desire as Keanu gets to taste a burger for the first time and so forth. Jokes start getting impeded by didacticism, and Ansari has no particularly keen thoughts about how shitty it is to work multiple jobs and still barely scrape by (or not). Reviews were meh, so I knew it likely was gonna collapse at some point, but watching that initial sharp energy and potentially hilarious twist ("He was a lost soul. I tried to show him that wealth wouldn't solve all his problems." "And?" "It seems to have solved most of his problems") get squandered was still quite disappointing. Excellent laundry-folding fodder when it hits streaming, though.