Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune opens with a divine mix-up and somehow ends up delivering one of the more heartfelt and sneakily insightful comedies of the year. It’s not flashy or awards-season bait — and that’s kind of the point. This is a mid-budget movie with big ideas, a very funny script, and a lineup of movie stars having an actual good time onscreen. Remember those?

The film stars Keanu Reeves (John Wick) as Gabriel, a mid-tier guardian angel whose job includes stopping people from texting while driving. He wants more — specifically, to help lost souls — and thinks he’s found the perfect candidate in Arj (Ansari, This Is the End), a broke gig worker who’s living in his car and barely holding it together. After observing Arj for a few days, Gabriel decides to stage a divine intervention: he switches Arj’s life with Jeff’s, a rich tech bro (Seth Rogen, The Fabelmans) who treats wealth like a personality. Gabriel thinks it’ll prove that money can’t buy happiness. Instead, it proves that money fixes…well, kind of everything.

From that point on, things spiral. Arj thrives in Jeff’s world and doesn’t want to switch back. Gabriel gets demoted and loses his wings. Jeff, now stuck in Arj’s old life, is forced to confront what it actually means to be broke in Los Angeles — spoiler: it’s not cute. There’s a lot of ground covered in 98 minutes: unionizing hardware store workers, AI-powered food delivery robots, a salsa dancing scene, and a surprisingly tender look at how people lose (and sometimes find) their sense of purpose in a system stacked against them.

You can also feel how personal this is for Ansari. After the derailment of his half completed film Being Mortal (read the gory details here) and the weight of public scrutiny, Good Fortune plays like a reset — and an intentional one. He’s not the loudest presence in the film (he gives Rogen and Reeves the spotlight), but his voice is all over it: dry, curious, a little bruised but still optimistic. And the fact that he got Reeves to do salsa dancing while nursing a fractured knee? That’s filmmaking magic.

Reeves is an absolute revelation. Gabriel could’ve easily been a smug punchline — a celestial straight man with robes and zingers. But Reeves plays him with a sort of deadpan earnestness that weirdly works. He’s warm, slightly awkward, and never above the material. Watching him fumble through human life — taking a dishwasher job, sleeping in a car, tenderly falling in love with earthly pleasures — is unexpectedly touching. The man broke his kneecap during filming and still came back to finish a dance number. Give him something for that.

Rogen, meanwhile, is in a comedic groove in 2025, having swept major awards with his near-perfect comedy for Apple, The Studio. Jeff starts as a caricature of Silicon Valley excess, but by the end, he’s the character you’re most surprised to care about. Ansari’s Arj is probably the most grounded of the trio — which makes sense — and Keke Palmer (Nope) brings a jolt of clarity as Elena, Arj’s coworker and union organizer who sees through all the fake humility.

Tonally, Good Fortune is somewhere between Trading Places and Scrooged with a modern L.A. filter. It doesn’t look expensive, but it doesn’t look cheap either — it just looks like a movie that knows what it is. That alone feels rare these days. The cinematography by Adam Newport-Berra is clean and unfussy. Carter Burwell’s score adds just the right amount of warmth. No prestige polish, just solid, effective filmmaking.

Sure, it’s not perfect. Some scenes rush by, and the third act tries to juggle a few too many threads. But I really appreciated that the film never loses its point: capitalism is absurd, yes, but it’s the human connections — not the money, not the status — that actually make the struggle worth it. And sometimes the most radical thing you can do in a comedy is give your characters dignity.

I wouldn’t call Good Fortune a classic, but I’d absolutely recommend it. It’s sharp, generous, and genuinely funny — the kind of film we don’t get enough of anymore. And as for Reeves? He’s not just an angel. He’s the heart of it.