Maintenance Required Review: When a big-box auto repair shop opens up beside a pop-and-mom all-women repair shop in a small town, things get heated. However, the two owners are completely unaware that they have been conversing for months anonymously and might even be in love with one another.
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Maintenance Required Prime Video Cast
Madelaine Petsch, Jacob Scipio, Madison Bailey, Katy O’Brian, Inanna Sarkis, Matteo Lane, Jim Gaffigan
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Maintenance Required Movie Director
Lacey Uhlemeyer
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Maintenance Required 2025 Writers
Lacey Uhlemeyer, Roo Berry, Erin Falconer
The film has a runtime of 103 minutes.
Maintenance Required Review
There’s something to be said about the never-ending stream of rom-coms that fall into our laps every single week. Be it on the big screen or the small, these films leave us with a heightened sense of emotions, making feelings in our hearts bubble to the surface, hoping to be swept away by a charming man/woman who has everything that we have been looking for. Mix in a little bit of conflict between the lovebirds, and you have everything that you need to make things juicy and moving.
Maintenance Required, however, features two protagonists who are just so annoying that it’s hard to get into it for an extended period of time. The film features the same old story of two people who are secret lovers without their knowledge and are rivals in real life, trying to get their lives in order and achieve their goals, and I have never felt more bored than I did while watching it unfold.
Charlie and Beau are the most boring, flat characters who only follow a script and nothing else. You don’t feel close to them, and neither do their lives seem exciting for us to lose ourselves in the emotions over. The conflicts in the film are so clichéd that I found myself getting irrationally angry at times, which is not the emotion one would expect a viewer to feel in a rom-com.
Jacob Scipio, moreover, doesn’t feel like a Prince Charming who will whisk me away to a palace. His performance is flat, and there is hardly any charm to distinguish him from anyone else in the cast. Madelaine Petsch is similar, and her character doesn’t have anything new or exciting about her other than being a passionate car repair woman. The other characters are simply there for humour or support, and while I enjoyed watching Madison Bailey and Katy O’Brian, I can’t say the same for the “jokes” the supporting cast makes.
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In the end, the problem with the film is that it’s one of many. It’s not different, and there are long sequences that you know you have watched in some other film. It’s disheartening to watch a romcom feel so lifeless and devoid of passion as the romance just doesn’t shine through. Maybe it’s the cast, the script or a combination of both, but Maintenance Required is annoyingly flat and juvenile, and I found it hard to connect to its conflicts. Or maybe having seen this same story twenty times was my limit. Who knows?
Final Thoughts
I don’t see the point of this film. It doesn’t make us feel anything other than annoyance and gives us the same-old cookie-cutter story that every other half-baked rom-com tries to shove down our throats. I am tired at this point, but I guess the same can’t be said about streaming services.
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