Charlie, the fiercely independent owner of an all-female mechanic shop, is forced to reevaluate her future when a flashy corporate competitor moves in across the street. Seeking comfort, she turns...
Well, for a film that highly emphasizes the strenuous, soul crushing labor of both business competition and relationship navigation with “Maintenance Required” warning lights, it operates on much less emotional maintenance than such a project like this would ask for.
In spite of not finding a “based on” or even a “thanks to” credit to confirm otherwise, this is just a shameless copy of a copy OF A COPY of two well respected rom-com’s : You Got Mail and The Shop Around the Corner, repacked and remolded for the current generation but without the tools or willpower to justify itself. Lo and behold, the same-old cookie-cutter story that every other half-baked rom-com tries to shove down our throats is back, relying heavily on contrivances, forceful button pushing and thanklessly coasting off gestures and conceits of the genre without marking out its own personality. If you’ve seen those two films I mentioned, it goes more or less exactly the way you’d expect, only now, the disingenuous simplicity of the formula comes off restricted and stagnant.
Don’t get me wrong, there is at least a functional efficiency to the structure here and a generally inoffensive nature to the proceedings. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with seeing every plot development from a mile away but the way this film handles its own by-the-numbers approach makes it next to impossible for the emotional beats to resonate and the hoops it jumps through to remain as far-fetched as possible only increases its own bizarre ludonarrative dissonance. Because the film simply HAS to commit to the liar-revealed and misunderstanding tropes (the very tropes I quickly learned to despise in these films), and also due to them rushing the fuck out of that third act, there’s hardly any incremental building blocks to properly convey the stakes it so desperately wants to implement, chugging along on fumes rather than any Grade A or B premium fuel that’d make this passionless trudge even vaguely interesting. And as if that wasn’t dispiriting enough, it also pulls a Mean Girls 2024 maneuver that lands it in a strange temporal limbo; draping itself in the contemporary aesthetic flourishes of now while the story’s core sensibilities remain fossilized in early 2000s rom-com embers…..
…so everything immediately feels dated.
Not to mention it practically walks straight into a trap having an anti-capitalism stance when it’s made in conjunction with the same Amazon overlords that litter us with product placement and maintain a stranglehold on our most essential needs (the spirit of War of the Worlds lives on). It’s always aggravating seeing films like this pretend to take a stance on something important only to act indifferent to the knots of dilemmas and crises that precipitate our way of life; all of its themes on female empowerment in a male-dominated field, anti-gentrification, striving for emotional connections when you’ve been disconnected for so long and small businesses having twice the heart of larger conglomerate companies when its run by the right people and community just sputter with all the maneuverability of a MAC truck….in park.
Lacey Uhlemeyer isn’t at the strongest of starts here in her directorial debut. With roots in journalism and documentary, I can see snippets of the sincerity and economic tension she wanted to warp the narrative around, but everything around her is so synthetic and juvenile, it inevitably just rubs off on her. Not only is her touch sadly prototypical and par of the course, it feels too distended for everyone else to make the most out of what she’s giving them.
Bare essentials of this production design are laid out in the most blatant ‘grin and bear it’ fashion from the second this starts. The few occasional flourishes where the rustic lived-in crampiness contrasts with the more polished, clean-cut sterility in its iconography generates the bare minimum of situational storytelling needed for the settings to feel inhabited and lived-in but outside of that, only two locations feign significance and everything is else is window dressing.
Presentation-wise, it’s intended to feel very late 90’s/2000’s coded but it never floats above or capitalizes said influences in a manner that feels endearing; this isn’t like Anyone But You where its ironic cheekiness wrestles some charm out of the rote formula, this might as well be a repurposed Hallmark card that forgot to sign its own name. Hamish Doyne-Ditmas’s doesn't capture many sharp visuals that work in conjunction with this but the technical deftness with his camerawork is just enough to elicit some mild competence from the framing, lighting is almost unremarkable, and the caffeinated editing from Bruce Green—thankfully barring quick cuts, jarring transitions, and attention-deficit scene changes—only just succeeds in keeping the film aesthetically appealing to the untrained eye.
For an 109 minute runtime, it actually moves at a decent enough pace—there’s almost a perfunctory quality to that speed—but it’s also not too brisk with it. The tone oscillates between saccharine sentimentality and forced quirkiness on a constant basis, coming off more cringy than I would’ve liked, all of the costumes are tolerable but that’s about it and any attempt at tension or suspense is lost before it even starts. Rob Lord’s musical score is generic, subdued and inconsequential all at once; I can’t make out a single composition or memorable motif out of this sonic porridge. Sound design isn’t much better either at asserting itself but at least the audio mixing doesn’t sound too jarring and out of place, and the PG-13 rating is about what you expect.
Also, the verisimilitude is woefully artificial here (the gritty reality of a character’s profession is often sacrificed for aesthetic appeal).
Our ensemble here is fairly adequate for what the material gives them, clunky dialogue notwithstanding, but given that rom-coms live and die on larger-than-life personalities to bolster the reliable scenarios, the characters here don’t do much to pick up the slack, especially when every one of them is either annoying as balls, wafer-thin in personality or at the mercy of the script running their one defining character quirk into the ground. Madelaine Petsch and Jacob Scipio both have decent enough chemistry that offset their arresting presence (which is slightly better than what The Strangers films have given Madelaine) but they are ill-served by exaggerated caricatures of relatable archetypes amongst an entire ocean full of them.
Really, any scene involving Katy O’Brian, Madison Bailey and Matteo Lane injected some life into the proceedings and got me the closest to laughing.
Pretending that Maintenance Required doesn’t benefit even a little bit from its throwback template and nostalgic formula would be disingenuous but it’s still a hollow shell of its influences, a rusty jalopy masquerading as a vintage Corvette, relying on dated tropes and cliches without any of the charm, heart or genuine emotional payoffs that made its predecessors sparkle.
