Review of Good Fortune – A very special guardian angel: Keanu Reeves Vs. the gig economy

Almost ten years ago, the iconic “Sad Affleck” meme began making the rounds after Ben Affleck looked particularly pensive alongside Henry Cavill at the Batman v Superman promo tour. But even that is nothing compared to what Keanu Reeves exudes as a guardian angel who specializes in “texting and driving”: With his trench coat that is too wide, his wings that are too small, his slumped shoulders and sad dachshund eyes, you just want to hold him in your arms and feed him gruel – and because it is Keanu Reeves, this infinitely longing melancholy makes him unkempt Beard or not, of course it just gets hotter. In any case, most trained action stars can only dream of the adoring “Ohs” from the audience in my imagination.

But even if his heavenly appearance comes first, the “Matrix” star is by no means the only reason to “Good Fortune – A very special guardian angel” in the cinema. Rather, the comedy is a rare example of a film that isn’t damn funny, although he has something to say, but precisely because of that, weil he has something to say: The narrative, which has been anchored in literature and cinema for centuries, that money and power do not bring happiness, but only a simple life opens the way to paradise, is ultimately one of the greatest propaganda coups in cultural history. Thanks to her, the super-rich in LA can now look out of their luxury cars at the tent cities on the side of the road without a guilty conscience and say with conviction that their own lives are at least as difficult.

LEONINE

Society has now internalized this view so much that even the naive, good-natured guardian angel Gabriel (Keanu Reeves) falls for the money-doesn’t-make-you-happiness bullshit: Although his job actually only consists of briefly tapping drivers on the shoulder while distracted by cell phones before they crash into a tanker without braking, Gabriel sees his great chance of saving a “lost one Soul” comes when he meets mini-jobber Arj (director and screenwriter Aziz Ansari) sleeping in his car.

After losing his apartment, he stays afloat with app jobs in which he is paid poorly and treated even worse by his customers. He can’t even defend himself, because then he gets a dreaded 1-star rating that could ultimately cost him his existence. But Gabriel wants to show Arj that, despite everything, he doesn’t have it that bad – and that the rich in the Hollywood Hills actually don’t have it any better: Arj is only supposed to take over the life of the extremely rich tech investor Jeff (Seth Rogen) for a few days in order to realize how difficult his everyday life really is. But puff cake! Jeff’s life is awesome – and Arj definitely doesn’t want to go back to his old life…

Good humor can sometimes hurt

An angel lets a poor man take over the life of a rich man in order to teach him a lesson – but the plan backfires in every way: “Good Fortune” has one of those ingenious premises that, in the past, when comedies were even more successful in the cinema, might have ensured that the studios would have a real bidding war for the project (the best example: “The Ice Princes”, where only for the… A seven-figure sum is said to have been raised for former competitors to compete together in figure pair skating. The most important question, of course, is what you do with it.

“Good Fortune” could easily have been a rather clumsy and loud “A Christmas Story” update à la “Spirited” with Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell. Instead, the look, which is not at all typically high-gloss, but rather surprisingly rough, promises that you might be trying to go a little deeper here – especially when Gabriel works as a dishwasher in a burger grill after losing his wings and looks like a character from a 1990s indie film by Jim Jarmusch during his smoking break.

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And actually: The gags about the pitfalls of the impersonal, exploitative gig economy are very well observed and are far from just the usual clichés. So every successful punchline also hurts a little at the same time – simply because it is so damn close to reality. The fictional app TaskSargeant, in which Arj takes on various jobs from “cleaning up the garage” to “queuing for two hours at a local bakery for a cinnamon roll”, is not as exaggerated as fictional app replicas in Hollywood films often are, but instead comes pretty close to the inhumane perversity of real-life models such as TaskRabbit or DoorDash. For anyone who would rather laugh than cry, “Good Fortune” is a surprisingly serious alternative to Ken Loach’s social realist gig-economy reckoning “Sorry We Missed You.”

Conclusion: A consistently funny comedy that actually has something to say – even Keanu Reeves in “Sad Affleck” meme mode is just the cherry on the cake.