“Good Fortune” - How do angels get their wings?

Good Fortune, a movie featuring Aziz Ansari and Seth Rogen - and Keanu Reeves as an inept angel - seemed like exactly the kind of movie I was craving. Something light-hearted and goofy because I just wanted to laugh for a couple hours. To forget about real life for a while. Definitely not to be depressed and pissed off at society at the conclusion of the film. You had ONE job, funny guys.

Arj (Ansari) is a gig worker living in his car. His gigs include being paid to stand in line for hours to buy a bagel, sorting crap in someone’s garage, and doing somebody’s laundry. This isn’t some new career invented in the last decade, by the way. People like Arj used to be referred to as assistants, maids, servants, or butlers. The difference is those people were typically employed full-time by whomever they were serving, sometimes being housed by those same employers. Think Downton Abbey or The Help or The Devil Wears Prada, but way, way more depressing.

After completing a gig for rich, tech-bro, venture capitalist Jeff (Rogen), Arj convinces Jeff to hire him as a full-time assistant. Everything starts to look up for Arj and by up I mean barely making enough money to live in a disgusting motel instead of his car. Unfortunately, Arj gets fired for using Jeff’s corporate credit card to pay for a dinner date one night, despite promising Jeff he would pay back the money. Arj soon finds there’s an even deeper rock bottom when his car/house gets towed. Hilarious, right?

Observing all this is an angel named Gabriel (Reeves). Not to be confused with the archangel from the Bible who serves as God’s messenger, Reeves’ Gabriel is entrusted with the responsibility of subtly alerting texting-while-driving humans into avoiding imminent accidents. Gabriel took an interest in Arj when he noticed Arj texting about having nothing to live for and believes Arj is a lost soul that needs to be saved. Despite Gabriel’s boss Martha (Sandra Oh) telling Gabriel not to stray from his assigned duties, Gabriel decides to Trading Places (or Freaky Friday for the gig generation) Jeff and Arj.

Gabriel thinks that if Arj spends a few days in the shoes of a rich person, Arj will realize his old, destitute life was worth living. Clearly, Gabriel is woefully naive, if not a complete moron. As Arj puts it a few days later “being rich solved all my problems.” Yeah, of course it did. That’s why rich people never give away all their money. The problem Gabriel now has is that he can’t restore Jeff and Arj to their former lives until Arj wants to go back. And, of course Arj doesn’t want to go back. And Jeff definitely wants his life back after trying and failing to live in Arj’s shoes for a few days.

Instead of using all of this setup to steer us to ha-ha land, writer/producer/director Ansari decided steer us in the opposite direction by focusing film on a bunch of social issues. Which for the record, is very admirable; our society is pretty messed up and getting worse much faster since the 2024 election. On top of the overt commentary regarding the plight of gig workers and the gig economy in general (including the desperation for good ratings in the apps used to hire gig workers), Ansari dives into unionization efforts, privileges certain people are born into, people working three jobs just to survive (living wages), and the callousness and ignorance of people who say idiotic things like “they can just get better jobs if they don’t like it.”

The messages do get across, but they are softened, if not altogether blunted, by the inclusion of the clueless Gabriel. After Gabriel’s colossal screw up, Martha fires him and makes him human (though says she will reconsider if Arj chooses to go back to his former life). Many of the messages Ansari wants to get across come via Gabriel, which makes the poor versions of Jeff and Arj redundant. And Gabriel steals the show every time he reacts in surprise to a first human experience. Eating a hamburger, sweating, or expressing disappointment when he sees how much of his first paycheck isn’t going into his pocket are all given the same weight in the screenplay. It’s funny unless it’s tragic.

Good Fortune isn’t a bad movie, but it is very confused about what it’s supposed to be. The entire cast, including Keke Palmer as Arj’s love interest Elena, do what they can to lift the film, but the screenplay can’t get of its or their way. There are occasional moments of comedy, but they are dwarfed by the serious issues in the film. And all muddled by the inclusion of angels doing menial tasks. Which might be an even sadder existence than the life of a gig worker.

Rating: Ask for twelve dollars back and remember to give me a good review.

“From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” - Killing Eve (or John Wick: Chapter 3.5).

Yes, that’s the actual title of the movie. Not just Ballerina, but From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. I triple-checked it. Lionsgate Films is making sure that everyone knows Ballerina is a John Wick movie. But that’s not all. Ballerina isn’t just a movie in the John Wick world, it’s a movie that features literal John Wick in much more than a cameo role. That’s how little faith Lionsgate has in a spinoff movie that’s ostensibly about a female assassin named Eve (Ana de Armas).

Like all John Wick films, Ballerina exists as little more than an action vehicle with just the tiniest hint of plot and a dash of world-building. Were you hoping Ballerina would shed some light on the High Table? Maybe get some real backstory and depth on the Continental Hotel chain? Or even just any character spending a couple of minutes actually explaining the hallowed rules of this assassin world? You know - the rules that everyone mentions but that nobody actually respects or follows? Well, keep on hoping.

Ballerina takes place between the events of John Wick 3 and John Wick 4. Remember early in John Wick 3 when John goes to a ballet theater owned by the Ruska Roma to meet with The Director (Anjelica Huston)? Me either. But that scene was partially recreated, followed by a quick conversation between Eve and John, to justify this movie’s existence. Eve is part of the Ruska Roma, having joined them as a child after her father was murdered by The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), leader of a mysterious and ruthless cult of assassins.

Again, like the other films, Ballerina gives frustratingly little information about its main entities - in this case the Ruska Roma and the assassin cult. The Ruska Roma are either assassins, ballet dancers, or both, but their business appears to be security protection rather than murder for hire. Honestly, it doesn’t actually matter. When Eve crosses paths with an assassin from the mystery cult, she confronts The Director for more information but is explicitly ordered not to pursue the cult due to a vaguely referenced agreement between the cult and the Ruska. But the rules of this world are broken all the time or simply not followed at all in the case of the cult. Eve wants vengeance for her father so, naturally, Eve ignores The Director.

What morsels we learn about the cult is a fraction of the little we learn about the Ruska. The cult lives in (and fully populates) a secret European mountain village, does not tolerate any members leaving, and...that’s really all we get. Eve’s dad was killed because he tried to leave with Eve. As Eve is searching for cult’s location, Eve tracks down a cult member staying at one of the Continentals (Norman Reedus). Turns out, he is doing the same with his daughter. The film gives a token attempt at tying this into Eve’s quest, but it’s really just another excuse to show how nobody follows the rules. In this case, an action sequence ensues in which a bunch of assassins “conduct business on Continental grounds,” which is expressly forbidden according to Winston (Ian McShane), but has happened in literally every John Wick movie. This universe is in the dumbest timeline.

But I get it - nobody is watching these movies hoping for rich world-building, clever dialogue, well-written plots, or fully fleshed-out characters. No, they’re here for the sweet, sweet action. And in that regard, nobody will be disappointed. de Armas is a very worthy choice as the next spotlighted assassin in this ultraviolent franchise, is easily as convincing a super assassin as Keanu Reeves. Like John, Eve is practically invincible, never misses a shot, can kill with anything she can get her hands on, and even takes quite the beating on multiple occasions.

And because this is movie number five in the franchise, the action scenes have steadily grown crazier and sillier to keep our attention. I particularly enjoyed Eve taking on a bunch of bad guys within the confines of an arms dealer’s hideout, as well as Eve battling her way through a town where even assassin children are trying to kill her. There are scenes featuring guns, knives, grenades, flame thrower duels, ice skates, and even dinner plates. Yeah, it’s as bonkers as it sounds and you should love every second of those scenes because, again, that’s why you’re there.

But none of those scenes can cover up for an egregious decision made by the filmmakers/studio - indulging in fan service that undercuts the value of Eve. You know, the protagonist of the film? I won’t give away the specifics (the previews featuring John took care of that), but John’s inclusion in the climax proves how little the writers and filmmakers care about the “World of John Wick” (heavy emphasis on the air quotes) or trust anything or anyone in it not named John Wick. And that, in a nutshell, is why I’ve always disliked this franchise.

Rating: Ask for fifteen dollars back because this was supposed to be Eve’s movie.

“John Wick: Chapter 4” - One thousand assassins dead, a zillion more to go.

“Once you kill him, then what?” a friend asks John Wick (Keanu Reeves). Great question. In the never-ending kill-box that is the John Wick universe, that question is the only time the franchise seems to realize that it has yet to include any kind of coherent plot. The first movie at least had a motivation for all the killings, as weak as that motivation was. Conversely, the sequels have all been bloodbaths solely for the sake of well-choreographed, long-cut bloodbaths, predicated on a vague set of rules that nobody has bothered to spell out. As far as we know, the answer to “then what” is more sequels with more killing because that’s the only thing that happens in Wick-land.

(SPOILER ALERT - LOL.)

At the end of JW3, NY Continental Hotel Manager Winston (Ian McShane) shot John off the top of the hotel and the inexplicably-not-dead John is spirited away in secret to the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), who was also left for dead. JW4 starts off with one of the worst openings I’ve ever seen - John punches a board wrapped in rope, the Bowery King walks and shouts his way to John’s secret location, and terrible music overlays it all. Once there, the Bowery King shouts, “is the king ready?” and holds up a new suit for John. The camera quickly zooms in on John, then cuts to the title screen. Embarrassing barely scratches the surface when describing this atrocity of a scene.

Shooting John was supposed to clear Winston in the eyes of the Who The Fuck Is The High Table, but arbitrary assassin rule ID.10.T states “LOL. JK.” Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard) punishes Winston by blowing up the NY Continental and killing his concierge Charon (Lance Reddick). Just like Santino blowing up John’s house in JW2, destroying the NY Continental seems like the dumbest possible way to coerce people in the assassin industry to help you.

This scene is also where we meet the Harbinger (Clancy Brown), another High Table representative who is half umpire, half lawyer. Another running theme of the Wick-iverse is barely defined characters, and Harbinger is tissue paper thin. Considering how supposedly inviolate the rules of this world are, I thought Harbinger The Umpire Lawyer was going to restore order and enforce the rules. Instead, he proves to be meaningless.

Cut to the Osaka Continental Hotel, where manager Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada) is going about his duties with his concierge/daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama). Yet again, we are presented with a Continental Hotel manager (the fourth, by my count), who shirks the consequences of breaking the rules to help John. Plus, we have Gramont’s men conducting business on hotel grounds, which is supposedly the most hallowed rule of them all, casually deeming the hotel no longer sacred ground simply because they suspect John might be there. Remember, the franchise’s entire *ahem* plot is based on John being hunted for breaking rules, yet over and over we see different parties breaking rules and betraying each other. As Chandler once said on Friends, “the rules are...there are no rules.”

Since the screenplays of the entire franchise can fit on a single coaster with room to spare, that leaves nearly the entire running time for action sequences. The good news is the quality of these scenes is still very good. They are still exquisitely choreographed and shot with long takes to give the audience what they came for. The bad news is the action scenes go on forever, bludgeoning the audience with them even more than in JW3. Imagine playing a first-person shooter video game with no cut scenes. Just waves and waves of enemies across multiple locations for the movie’s runtime of 169 minutes. That is not a typo. JW4 is nearly three hours long, but feels closer to thirteen.

While I am a big fan of great action scenes, every one of them was at least ten minutes too long. Again, that is not a typo. There are four major action scenes that wallow in bloodshed, each more tedious than the last as they stretch on into oblivion. I became so bored during them that all I could think about was where the hell were all these assassins coming from. And why. JW1 and JW2 established John Wick as a terrifying and near-mythical assassin known to everyone. Yet, the moment a contract on his life is put out there, literally every assassin in the world tries to kill him. I would have loved to see just one assassin look at their phone and go “meh, no.”

To be fair, an assassin called Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson) kind of says no to the contract. This is not satisfying. I’ll skip the descriptions and just tell you that Mr. Nobody has a killer dog as a partner and some other assassin dude that joins them is blind (Donnie Yen). That is all. Pew, pew, pew. Stab, stab, stab.

Like the Scream and Fast and Furious franchises, John Wick has abandoned competent writing in favor of indulgent fan service. How does John survive dozens of bad guys shooting at him? He holds his ballistic suit jacket in front of him. Why do bad guys immediately die when hit by a car, but John can walk away from the same? Because he’s the main character. How is the NY Continental still standing after we literally see it demolished from Gramont’s window? Physics. Silly stuff like that plus zero character development and no plot is why I stopped being amused by this franchise before the credits rolled in JW1.

And so we come back to that original question - now what? The end of JW4 seemingly wraps up the kill-John-Wick-for-breaking-the-rules plot (I’m not spoiling if John dies or not, but the duel at the end gives John his freedom from being hunted, dead or alive). It would be naive to think Lionsgate won’t make JW5 if JW4 makes a profit (there are two spin-offs in the works as well). It would also be naïve to think that in this barely developed, contradictory assassin world there isn’t another person with a grudge against John or IOU from John that can be turned into seven more hours of John mowing down hundreds of other assassins. But if my phone does chirp with a message that JW5 is coming, I might just have to say “meh, no.”

Rating: Ask for seventeen dollars and your coaster back.

“The Matrix: Resurrections” - Control-Alt-Delete.

Way back in 1999, the idea of a Matrix sequel was a no-brainer. Neo had just destroyed Agent Smith, warned the artificial intelligence that he was going to set everyone’s minds free, and flew off into the sky like Superman. Four years later, the two-part sequel released and were a bit of a letdown, to say the least. We got what we asked for, but were disappointed in what we got. At that point, we realized that the original Matrix was a unique moment in film that probably should have been left to stand by itself. I’d like to think Hollywood learned its lesson and that’s why there aren’t sequels to Interstellar or Inception.

Of course, Hollywood’s lizard brain usually makes the decisions because MONEY!!! Now we have another Matrix sequel - Resurrections. And, not just any sequel, but a sequel that doubles as a remake. This makes sense when you consider that pretty much everyone disliked the sequels, so what better way to atone for them than to bring back as much of the original as possible? And, since it’s The Matrix we’re talking about, a reboot/sequel can easily be explained because <insert computer jargon here>.

(SPOILER ALERT - There is no spoon.)

In case you did not see how the trilogy ended, Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) die. Not in the Matrix, but in the real world. The film ends with the Oracle and the Architect discussing if the peace between humans and machines will last and agreeing to free any humans who wish to leave the Matrix. It’s a pretty definitive conclusion to the story, with the only untied string being a final question - if we will see Neo again - thrown in because Hollywood just can’t resist.

Decades later, the Matrix is stable and the human city of Zion has been renamed Io and filled with humans no longer worried about killer sentinels coming for them. The film opens with a replay of the original film’s opening scene. You know the one. Trinity (or a woman who looks very much like her) is in a deserted hotel room, cops bust in to arrest her, and she does the kick where bullet-time cinematography blows our minds away. Except, this time, different agents chase Sort-of-Trinity, and we’re watching it from behind a wall with Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and a hologram of Bugs’ handler, Sequoia (Toby Onwumere). This piques our interest, especially when Trinity is captured on a rooftop, rather than escaping. At the same time, Bugs ends up being discovered by an agent and another chase ensues, where she ends up trapped in a secret room with an agent. But, not just any agent, but one that is actually a program embodying Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Bugs helps him escape the Matrix and into a body consisting of nanobots in the real world. Confused yet? Welcome to the new Matrix.

It turns out that many of the machines decided to cooperate with the humans and help them with various tasks like growing strawberries. No, seriously. Blueberries too. This will freak out Neo, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Neo (who is back to his ignorant human self, Tom Anderson) is now a prominent game-developer in the Matrix. He is most famous for creating the Matrix game, which is the movie’s way of winking at the audience in a quasi-fourth-wall-break kind of way. Incidentally, the movie will also make multiple references to the original trilogy in the same way, including kind of taking a dump on bullet-time. Then, the movie will tell you how Warner Brothers is forcing another Matrix sequel and, geez, we get it already.

Anyway, Tom is seeing a therapist (Neil Patrick Harris) because he is struggling to keep reality and fantasy separate in his head. Tom is also having meetings with his business partner, Smith (Jonathan Groff), who Tom also discusses his struggles with, in addition to the new game Tom is working on. A montage of days go by where we see Tom continuing to struggle, ingesting blue pills prescribed by his therapist, and having daily brainstorming sessions with his developer group about the Matrix sequel. We all know this can’t last, but we also are wondering how Tom is even alive, since Neo died in the old trilogy. Then, Trinity shows up in a coffee shop when Tom is there and we’re like “finally!” Except, Trinity is just a mom named Tiffany, with two kids and a husband and we’re like “oh, come on!”

Eventually, we get to the part where Tom is freed and becomes Neo again, this time by Bugs and Morpheus. There is gobbledygook about Neo having created a modal for them to find (the original Trinity scene), but we have no idea what that means. I work with software developers all day and I have never heard that term. But the film is going to pretend that the audience isn’t completely confused and just move on with what it really wants to do - nostalgia.

And thus we come to the real issue with this film - what is the point besides nostalgia? The nostalgia is laid on so thick that we literally see clips of scenes from the original trilogy sprinkled throughout the film. In addition to the modal, Agent Smith reappears, but as Tom’s business partner (Groff), we get a tweaked reprise of the dojo training scene with Morpheus, Neo’s body being retrieved from the battery-pod, and even the Merovingian because why not? And still we’re wondering, how is Neo/Tom still alive? And, Trinity/Tiffany for that matter.

Well, I’ll leave that explanation for the movie to give you, and you should know that it is long. Really long. And done in a way that Lana Wachowski (Lilly was not involved for this film) thought was clever, but comes off as a bit of a slap in the face to the audience. To be fair, maybe that slap was just to wake us up because the scene is just so boring. The villain has the ability to move at Quicksilver speeds and monologues while everything around him, Neo included, barely moves. It’s not a fun scene to watch nor is the monologue particularly interesting. The entire scene reinforces the notion that the original film was a unicorn.

Throughout the film, I kept wondering what the actual story was and what was at stake. The first film very clearly establishes the stakes - saving the human race. The two sequels continue with the same concept - saving the human race, with the subplot being the love story between Neo and Trinity. Resurrections does not appear to care even a tiny bit about the fate of the human race, even going out of its way to point out that there is a peace between humans and machines to the point they are literally cooperating with each other. Instead, the film really leans into the love story that was over at least one movie ago.

(Side note: one element of the story is that the machines are at war with each other over an energy shortage. This makes no sense for so many different reasons. Why can’t the machines build something that goes into space to collect energy? Are the machines reproducing themselves like humans, with no regard to resource requirements or how much the planet can sustain? Does artificial intelligence really just mean acting like stupid, selfish, violent humans?)

Convoluted story aside, maybe the most disappointing aspect of the film is that nearly all of the aesthetics from the original trilogy are gone. The martial arts and fight choreography were practically non-existent, the bullet-time is gone and even derided by the movie, and the score was both unmemorable and often didn't fit the tone of the scenes. Plus, the sheer amount of footage spliced in from the original trilogy became tired. At first it was cool, then it just felt lazy and unnecessary. It was like watching a flashback episode of a sitcom, which is always the episode you could tell was done out of sheer convenience for an easy paycheck.

Don’t get me wrong. I did somewhat enjoy going back to the Matrix and there were some bright spots. The actors not named Reeves and Moss were clearly thrilled to be in a Matrix movie. While Reeves and Moss all but sleepwalked through a script that gave them little to do, the rest of the cast was relishing a chance to be as cool as the original cast looked (especially Groff, who really made Smith his own). To be fair to the film, I’m going to watch it again, and maybe there are things I missed that will make me enjoy it more. I just did this with James Bond: No Time to Die and it was definitely better the second time around. Granted, I enjoyed No Time to Die on the first viewing a lot more than I enjoyed Resurrections. Maybe I just need another reboot.

Rating: Ask for seven dollars back for what felt like discount Matrix.