Maintenance Required Review
Director: Lacey Uhlemeyer
Date Created: 2025-10-08 19:38
1.5
Maintenance Required Review: Lacey Uhlemeyer directs this Prime Video movie, starring Madelaine Petsch as Charlie, Jacob Scipio as Beau, along with Madison Bailey, Katy O’Brian, Inanna Sarkis, Matteo Lane, Jim Gaffigan, and others. It is approximately 103 minutes long and is a movie that aspires to be a quaint romantic comedy, filmed on location amidst a small town where cars and love intersect. How can that be bad — two people who do not know each other, who fall in love with one another on the internet and are real-life rivals? But the reality? It is a movie that cannot get the emotional motor running, and before one can even realise what hit them, the movie is dead on the ground.
Maintenance Required Review
Prime Video movie Maintenance Required revolves around Charlie, a passionate self-taught mechanic who runs her late daddy’s all-female car mechanics garage, O’Malley’s. Her unobtrusive business is shattered when a gargantuan corporate chain sets up directly across the road, under the management of Beau, a man as quick-witted on text message as he is infuriating in the flesh. What both fail to realise is that the two have in fact been chatting with each other anonymously on the computer, bonding over cars, dreams, and a mutual love of antique motors. After the true identities are revealed, craziness erupts, not the very humorous, amusing kind.
It desperately wants to bring the charm of the old romantic comedies, but can’t really succeed in being a decent retelling of films we’ve all seen over and over again. There is no real chemistry with the leads, no real tension, and worst of all, no cause to be invested in whatever is going to take place next. It just goes along on tropes and predictable plot points that make watching the film difficult.
Madelaine Petsch, who is generally the zest that she is, is constrained in a groove that doesn’t know how to deal with her energy. Charlie is a feisty independent woman that she should be, but she is one note and boring. Jacob Scipio as Beau is no better — he reads the character like one reading the instructions, not the emotions. Their romance, the focal point of a rom-com, is almost non-existent.
Even the side characters, like Madison Bailey and Katy O’Brian, are underutilised. They are just present as laughter and warmth generators, and their one-liners are unimpressive; their scenes are filler scenes. Side characters could have made the movie into a blockbuster, as they could have carried some scenes, but as they are, they just fill spaces between times of quiet.
What was least rewarding about Prime Video’s Maintenance Required is that the film is hardly emotive. It attempts love, lust, and personal tragedy, then never really goes all-in on one of the above. Romance is too precipitous, conflict too staged, and even the supposedly dramatic scenes don’t really scratch the surface.
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There are scenes that are crafted to draw a response out of you, like Charlie frantically working to keep her daddy’s store afloat, or Beau finally learning that his work is shoddy, and they come and go without leaving any impression whatsoever. It is like the film is expecting the viewer to be sympathetic, as da-da, this is a romance, but that is not how that is done. You need actual emotion, and the Maintenance Required film has none.
At the halfway point, it is agonizingly predictable how the story will turn out. You can forecast every brawl, every miscommunication, and every dramatic apology scene before any of them occur. Fine for the comfort rom-com, but only if the process is a delight. Here, it is not. Humour is too dry, the pace is inconsistent, and even the triumphant closing is stuck on with all the subtlety of a Band-Aid.
When she finally finds that Beau is, indeed, the man whom she was texting the entire time, this would have been such a fantastic dramatic plot twist. It is instead resolved in such a cheesy, predictable way that you never really do feel anything. Their epic love reunion at the end is more a formality than something that you would want.
The credit goes to Director Lacey Uhlemeyer for making the film visually clean, the small town backdrop and garage workshop style look pretty on the eye. But pretty images can only carry the film so far when the material under the surface is so lacking. It drags on pace, and the film had a number of scenes that meander along without resolution. Even the background music that is aimed at elevating pivotal scenes comes across as unoriginal.
Prime Video Maintenance Required Review: Summing Up
Frankly, the Maintenance Required movie feels like a checklist rom-com. We’ve got the plucky small-town heroine, the smooth businessman with the soft centre, the misinterpretation, the breakup, and the reunion. It’s all there — none of that necessarily works. It’s like watching a movie built on the template of the romantic comedy, without the panache and the fun that characterise the genre.
Occasionally, the film presses too hard to be “cute” or “quirky,” and that comes across as inauthentic. Humour backfires, and the scenes of drama thereafter seem like afterthoughts. I found myself glancing at the time — and that is never a harbinger on the part of a film that is destined to be lighthearted and airy.
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