Starring Aziz Ansari, Keanu Reeves, Seth Rogan, Sandra Oh

Written & Directed by Aziz Ansari

Lionsgate, in cinemas now

An inept angel meddles in the lives of a struggling gig worker and a wealthy venture capitalist.

Remember Wim Wenders’s critically acclaimed 1987 romantic fantasy Wings of Desire where Peter Falk played an angel who had hung up his wings to experience the world as a human? No? There was other stuff in it, but people only remember the Peter Falk bits because he was famous for playing shabbily raincoated TV detective Columbo.

Okay, let’s try again. Remember Trading Places, John Landis’s 1983 comedy where down on his luck street hustler Eddie Murphy, and super rich commodities broker Dan Ackroyd are forced to live each other’s lives with hilarious but morally affirming consequences? Even if you never saw it, you can probably guess how that played out.

Here’s one you will know: It’s A Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart loses everything and is about to commit suicide when an angel (second class) called Clarence shows him what the world would be like without him. Yeah, that one. Always on at Christmas.

I only mention them because if you’ve seen those movies then you probably don’t need to bother with Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut Good Fortune which is essentially a mash up of all three, and sadly not as artistically interesting as Wings of Desire, nowhere near as funny as Trading Places, and certainly not as emotionally affecting as It’s A Wonderful Life.

Ansari plays Arj, a failed documentary film maker (do we care?) trapped in the gig economy starting to doubt whether his life is worth living, who gets sacked by super rich venture capitalist (do we care?) Jeff (Seth Rogan). Along comes an apprentice angel, Gabriel (Keanu Reeves, looking like Jesus but sporting Columbo’s shabby raincoat), who swaps their lives over (for narratively unconvincing reasons), and is punished by his boss Sandra Oh and loses his wings and has to be human until he can put things right again. If you think you can work out how this one plays out too, you’d be right. It doesn’t have a surprising moment in it. We have quite literally seen this movie before… three times.

But, arguably, that wouldn’t matter if Ansari was bringing something new to the table by creating this mix ‘n’ match narrative rehash. Unfortunately he can’t seem to decide which of these movies he likes the most, and the plot wanders between all three never quite making up its mind. Rogan and Reeves bring their screen comedy credentials to the project, with Keanu in particular managing to breathe some life into his scenes. Sadly, however, putting himself at the centre of it, Ansari is the weak link. He just isn’t that great as a screen actor. He’s certainly no Eddie Murphy (a comedy powerhouse in his day) nor can he win our hearts like Jimmy Stewart. Nor, sadly, does his writing have the edge to make this overly familiar material sparkle anew. The story takes forever to get going and it while it is good-natured and certainly amusing in places, it was precisely forty minutes before the film elicited an audible laugh from me or anyone else in the audience (I know this because I checked my watch to mark the event) – and that was for one of Keanu’s lines. There were maybe three or four more laughs before the whole thing ran out of steam about fifteen minutes before it finally ended.

Verdict: The problem with Good Fortune is that despite everyone’s best efforts it feels like reheated leftovers rather than the reinvention of classic ingredients it wants to be. 5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com