Watching, or rather enduring, Amazon-MGM’s charmless new romantic comedy Maintenance Required, I was so convinced it was an officially sanctioned re-imagining of You’ve Got Mail that I scoured the credits for confirmation. Surely, even in this cursed AI era of copyright erosion, no one would so shamelessly regurgitate the beats of that much-adored film without giving the requisite credit?
But try as I might, I could not find a “based on” or even a “thanks to”, the film a copy of a film which was itself a (legally sound) remake of a film which had been inspired by a play (the script even, cheekily, refers to “a sweet little shop around the corner”). In a film that will hopefully be used as evidence in an upcoming lawsuit, a woman tries to keep her struggling local business alive as a big-brand competitor opens over the street while she secretly chats to a man online who just so happens to be her business rival. Scene where he tells her to fight for what’s hers, which leads her to a TV appearance? Check. Scene where he finds out who she really is as she waits for their first in-person date? Check. Ensuing scene where he shows up, doesn’t tell her the truth, and she blasts him for being a corporate sellout? Check. Winning chemistry, sharp wit and a buoyantly romantic ending? Oh, wait.
Because as much as ChatGPT might be able to replicate the rough shape of a You’ve Got Mail rip-off (the film is allegedly written by three humans, Lacey Uhlemeyer, Roo Berry and Erin Falconer), it can’t capture any of that film’s humanity or even basic charm. The updates to the plot only make it that much worse – this time it’s not duelling bookstores but rather mechanics, and instead of meeting in a 1998-suited AOL chatroom, now it’s a Reddit forum for car enthusiasts – and only serve to show how ill-suited this particular story is for a more online age. There’s really no reason for Riverdale alum and Strangers reboot survivor Madelaine Petsch’s Charlie and British actor Jacob Scipio’s Beau to delay an offline meet in this iteration other than her being vaguely uninterested in dating and him kinda sorta seeing a poorly defined Bad Woman.
They share inane tidbits over fixing cars online (which are, yep, easier than fixing people, apparently) and limply spar in person, but there’s no warmth to the former and no bite to the latter. The plot has no real sense of incremental build, making it unclear just how Charlie’s business is faring and what its collapse would truly mean to her (that sad crush one felt in You’ve Got Mail, as long-held memories faded into corporate anonymity, never coming). Like the one smash-hit romcom everyone is desperate to replicate, 2023’s Anyone But You (a film that did at least credit Shakespeare for the source material), casting is based less on likability and more on Instagram aesthetics, the two handsome actors looking well-styled and gym-trained but lacking any of the charisma sorely needed for the genre (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were always closer to cute than sexy). It’s most jarring with Petsch, who is supposed to be playing a rough-and-ready mechanic who rolls her eyes at glamour (“I much prefer wheels to heels,” she says) but even when she’s busy working on a car, she’s as pristinely styled as an influencer posing with an Erewhon smoothie, with only the lightest grease stain carefully positioned on her forehead.
In a smarter script, there’s something more to explore with the dynamics of the business feud, as a male-led conglomerate tries to crush a smaller female-led competitor in a field that doesn’t typically allow for much gender diversity, but the film has nothing on its brain beyond car puns. It’s also extremely hard to stomach the film’s anti-gentrification, anti-capitalism stance when it’s made in conjunction with the cartoonishly evil Amazon overlords and littered with product placement (a scene of the female mechanics raging against the system has one of them holding a bag of Smartfood white cheddar popcorn aimed toward the camera).
There’s really nothing to see here, just another synthetic simulation of a film and a genre we used to love, less maintenance required and more complete overhaul.
