‘Maintenance Required’ Review – Prime Video’s Wildly Derivative Rom-Com Kind Of Works

There is no way to scientifically measure this, but I reckon Maintenance Required is the most derivative romantic comedy ever made. It’s You’ve Got Mail, but with cars. The shop is literally around the corner. Every expected beat is hit, in precisely the way you imagine. You could predict the ending after the first five minutes. In this soulless age of AI slop masquerading as real craft, Amazon-MGM’s movie is precisely the kind of feature that might convince you the robots have taken over and are living among us. And yet…

Traditional rom-coms, all slavishly devoted to the same formula, have largely fallen out of favour, one suspects precisely because they’re all slavishly devoted to the same formula. But that cocktail of happenstance, meet-cutes, crossed wires, and last-minute reconciliations became popular in the first place because it resonated in a big, crowd-pleasing way, and it turns out when you’ve been starved of something for a while, there’s a nostalgic quality even to a rip-off. I watched this with my partner, which is probably ill-advised when Jacob Scipio is around, and I could sense her buying in. I wasn’t far behind. There’s an oddly likeable, turn-your-brain-off quality to the whole thing that I think benefits from a rom-com that is liable to collapse the more you think about it.

There’s no official connection between Maintenance Required and You’ve Got Mail, which might seem surprising once you’ve seen it. The plot finds humble mechanic Charlie (Madelaine Petsch) struggling to keep her inherited family auto-shop in business when a big-brand competitor opens up across the street. The competitor is Beau (Scipio), who’s so handsome he simply has to be the leading man, which doesn’t go unnoticed by Charlie. What she doesn’t realise, though, is that Beau is also the dream man she has been connecting with on a forum (remember those?).

So far, so familiar. And, frankly, it doesn’t get any less familiar as it goes. Charlie and Beau circle around their real-life connection – obvious to Charlie’s friends Izzy (Madison Bailey, Outer Banks) and Kam (Katy O’Brian, The Mandalorian), and Beau’s bestie Jordan (Matteo Lane) – without realising that they’ve both already fallen in love with each other’s idealised online persona. One of them finds out the truth and hides it. Eventually, the other one learns the same. They flirt, fall out, and make up. There’s a last-minute dash to find each other before the potential romance is lost forever, with all the pals helping out. It’s the movie-making equivalent of IKEA flat-pack furniture. And yet…

It could be the chemistry between the implausibly attractive leads, which feels believable enough. It could be the humour, which isn’t overdone and feels better for it. It could just be the comfort and familiarity of a movie that has no interest in being anything other than precisely what you expect it to be. But something about Maintenance Required is quite charming and watchable, and I reckon, perhaps against my better judgement, that people will watch it and enjoy it in large enough numbers that Amazon will consider it to have been a good idea.

The critic in me has to nitpick, obviously. Charlie and Beau’s justifications for not meeting in person are very flimsy, and the constant reiteration that their connection is more genuine because it developed on a forum instead of a dating app feels oddly performative. The corporate critique, accurate though it may be, is cartoonishly broad, enough that it scarcely makes sense for Beau to have lasted so long at the company in the first place (his nickname is “The Closer”, since his special skill is subsuming local businesses everywhere he goes.) The script, credited to Lacey Uhlemeyer, Roo Berry, and Erin Falconer, sometimes – okay, often – forgets how real human beings speak and behave.

The most egregious error, because it speaks to an inauthenticity at its core, is that Maintenance Required tries to have its cake and eat it. Charlie is supposed to be a grease-stained gearhead redefining the automotive industry to be a female-friendly safe space, but there isn’t a single frame of this movie in which she isn’t styled to look like a lads’ mag cover model. Beau is supposed to be a cut-throat corporate assassin, but he’s never presented as anything other than an extremely nice and well-meaning dude trapped in a soulless job he hates, even though he doesn’t seem to hate it and only quits when one of his expansion ideas is nixed. The conflict happens around who we’re told these people are, not who they’re shown to be.

And Amazon needs to knock it off with the product placement. There’s nothing quite as egregious here as the final act of legendarily terrible Prime Video stablemate War of the Worlds, but they’re cut from a similar cloth. It’s almost as if Amazon won’t declare anything an original on their platform without a certain amount of corporate bootlicking, which isn’t ideal in a staunchly anti-capitalist romance.

And yet…