‘Good Fortune’ review: Keanu Reeves plays an angel gifting economic justice

It's easy to miss the confidence of Billy Wilder or Frank Capra whenever some brave soul tries to make a comedy that will excite America with its mix of cynicism and optimism. These Hollywood masters had a knack for combining the sweet, the sour and the satirical, and in Wilder's case, they even made you believe there was a happy ending.

However, after his directorial debut in the film “Luck” Aziz Ansariwhich stars alongside Seth Rogen and Keanu Reeves (as an angel named Gabriel), swings, hoping to capture that playful vibe of a true State of Things story. Its theme is also a fruitful one: the gig economy contributing to our crushing inequality, as well as the desperation of the have-nots and how oblivious the rich are to those who made them rich. So let's stick it to billionaires! Let Keanu help the disadvantaged!

Ansari's tale of high and low morality, set in our fair (and unjust) Los Angeles, is a friendly mix of stories with a heavenly twist (“Heaven Can Wait,” “Wings of Desire”) and a body-swap comedy (“Trading Places”). But no matter how pleasant it may be, it cannot match its barbs with its sentimentality. He has a heart, kind eyes, a wry smile and some funny lines, but no teeth when you actually need to bite something down, chew it and spit it out.

Ansari plays Arge, experiencing a serious disconnect between his professional identity (as a wannabe Hollywood film editor) and the way he actually exists: advocating for scraps and living in his car. When a garage remodeling job for Jeff (Rogen), a Bel-Air venture capitalist, turns into an assistant position, Arge feels secure enough to use the company card for a fancy dinner with casual co-worker and romantic interest Elena (the underused Keke Palmer). However, Jeff records the next day's expenses (a realistic detail about how the rich watch every penny) and immediately fires Arge.

All the while, Arge's sad situation has been affecting long-haired, khaki-suited angel Reeves, whose life-saving line of work (he specializes in shoving distracted drivers) is low in the hierarchy controlled by guardian boss Martha (Sandra Oh). It takes a lot of healing work for Gabriel to show Arju, with a little role reversal magic, that being Jeff isn't all it's cracked up to be. Except, of course, this. (David Mamet's line “Everyone needs money – that's why they call it money” comes to mind.) Arge, newly luxurious and loving it, shows no signs of wanting to go back (which is apparently his call to action in the rules of this scenario), leaving an unsettled Gabriel forced to convince the sudden billionaire why he should become poor again.

It's here that “Luck,” for all its awareness of how Depression-era screwball comedies made the filthy rich a mockery, struggles to combine its problematic humor with its committed heart. While it's fun to watch Rogen's newly desperate character suffer the humiliation of a food delivery, buying into the script changes and the film's naive idea of ​​where everyone should be in the end is a different matter entirely. That's why screwball comedies didn't try to destroy capitalism, but just have fun with it and let a simple love story land. Ansari's ambition is admirable, but he is better at diagnoses than solutions.

His brilliant turn gave the hilariously deadpan Reeves one of his best performances in years: a silly meme brought to disarming life and the film's beating heart. Doing good can be hard work; understanding people is more difficult. Plus, Reeves turns eating a hamburger for the first time into an extremely funny confirmation that sometimes it really is a wonderful life.