If there’s one place you can count on to pervert biblical truth into a Gnostic mockery, it’s Hollywood. No better poster child for this blasphemy than actor and producer Seth Rogen, who’s spent the last 15 years turning sacred narratives into stoner punchlines and irreverent dreck.

Surprisingly, though, this isn’t his film—Rogen’s just the gluttonous sidekick here. The true ringleader of the sacrilege is Aziz Ansari, making his directorial debut with Good Fortune, a 2025 supernatural comedy but peel back the glossy satire on gig-economy woes, and you’ll find a deliberate inversion of divine order: angels as bumbling bureaucrats, salvation as a DIY body-swap scam, and God’s sovereignty swapped for humanistic “empathy” exercises.

It’s not comedy; it’s a profane parable that drags heaven through the mud. In the gig-app hellscape of Los Angeles—where dreams die on delivery fumes and rents devour souls—aspiring documentarian Arj (Aziz Ansari) scrapes by in his beat-up car, juggling hardware-store drudgery, botched food drops amid robotic rivals, plasma sales, and app blacklists. Amid the grind, he courts Elena (Keke Palmer), a spitfire coworker rallying the warehouse drones for a union uprising against corporate vampires. Enter Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a jaded low-rung guardian angel mired in the drudgery of thwarting texting-while-driving wrecks.

Yearning to redeem the truly lost, Gabriel zeros in on Arj’s downward spiral. A fluke delivery flings Arj into the lair of tech billionaire Jeff (Seth Rogen), a hedonistic hollow man drowning in mansions, disco basements, poolside orgies, and inherited billions that can’t fill his existential void. Hired as Jeff’s gofer, Arj’s cheeky unauthorized spree on the boss’s black card backfires spectacularly, earning a pink slip and a fresh avalanche of bad luck.

As Arj’s fortunes crater, Gabriel’s celestial overseer Martha (Sandra Oh) issues a stern no-touch order. Defiant, the angel cooks up a heavenly hack: a body-swap to force-feed empathy, shoving Arj into Jeff’s opulent excess and stranding the tycoon in Arj’s squalor. What follows is a cyclone of cringeworthy role reversals, half-baked heart-to-hearts, and satirical swipes at inequality’s farce—Arj “thriving” in wealth (even wooing Elena, who oddly clings to poverty for “authenticity”), while Jeff flounders in ramen and regret.

But the real heresy blooms when Gabriel’s meddling boomerangs: stripped of wings and demoted to mortal flesh as Jeff’s slovenly roommate—chain-smoking, burger-slurping, and gig-hustling his way to “joy” in dive bars and dance floors. It’s a “fall” framed as enlightenment, with the film crowning transgression as the path to true humanity.

Good Fortune is a deliberate Gnostic mockery of the biblical narrative, contorting angels, salvation, and God’s unassailable sovereignty into a rebel’s fever dream of body-swapping illusions and feel-good humanism. Gnosticism peddles a dualistic trap: the material world as a Demiurge’s prison (that flawed tyrant-god, Yahweh recast as the villain), where secret “gnosis”—forbidden knowledge—frees the divine spark in man via enlightened go-betweens, often rogue angels like Azazel, the scapegoat of Leviticus 16 who taught forbidden crafts to mortals (Book of Enoch 8:1).

Here, Ansari resurrects this venom, depicting heaven as a soul-crushing cubicle farm, angels as underpaid Ubers for the divine, and redemption as a self-help swap meet—elevating the heretic Azazel as the “successful” rebel who delivers the illicit boon Gabriel can’t. To unmask this inversion, let’s personify the film’s Gnostic rot through two archetypes: the Witless Angel Gabriel, a fumbling fool blind to celestial hierarchy, mocking holy messengers as hapless hall monitors; and the Heroic Rebel Azazel, the audacious defier who “wins” by bucking God’s decree, peddling the lie that sin against the Almighty sparks authentic life.

The core abomination detonates in Gabriel’s illicit swap: Arj (the downtrodden everyman, echoing Job’s trials sans faith) vaults into Jeff’s gilded cage, seducing Elena while Jeff wallows in authentic grit—supposedly proving “money can’t buy happiness,” but really exalting material flux over eternal truth. Gabriel’s punishment—wingless exile into carnality, reveling in Chicken McNuggets, smokes, and sudsy dish pits, even grooving on a disco floor in profane ecstasy—twists the Fall into frolic.

Scripture brands Lucifer’s plunge as pride’s wreckage (Isaiah 14:12-15: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer… for thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend above the heights”), chaining sinning angels in Tartarus’s gloom (2 Peter 2:4). Yet Good Fortune cheers Gabriel’s demotion as deliverance, aping Gnostic myths where Sophia tumbles into matter, birthing the cosmos through her “error” and gaining “wisdom” via woe—a blasphemous flip of Jude 1:6, which damns angels who forsook their “first estate” for judgment.

Where the Bible demands repentance and divine grace (Ephesians 2:8-9: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves”), the film swaps sovereignty for sorcery, body-hopping as the shortcut to “empathy”—a humanistic heresy that crowns man’s rebellion over God’s redemption.

Ansari, drawing from It’s a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death (both 1946 stairways to heaven sans the Savior), shadows gig workers and delivery drones for “authenticity,” but it’s a veneer over venom. Reeves’ affable doofus (echoing Bill & Ted’s cosmic cluelessness) sells the sabotage, Rogen’s slacker excess amplifies the gluttony (Proverbs 23:20-21 warns against the “winebibber” and “glutton”), and Palmer’s fiery Elena adds rom-com gloss to the grind. Oh’s Martha, the stern suit in the sky, embodies the Demiurge’s petty rule—cold bureaucracy over compassionate Creator.

Critics praise the “promising debut” and “socially minded” swipes at wealth gaps, but they miss the metaphysical middle finger: this isn’t mere class satire; it’s a stealth sermon for self-deification, whispering that forbidden swaps (like Eve’s fruit) unlock “true” fortune, a timely toxin, preying on pandemic-era precarity to peddle Gnostic “liberation” from God’s “oppressive” order.

Good Fortune doesn’t redeem; it reprobates. Hollywood’s heresy machine churns on, but believers beware: this isn’t entertainment—it’s enticement to the abyss.

1/5

Don’t forget to Subscribe for Updates. Also, Follow Us at Society-Reviews, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Odysee, Rumble, and Twitch