Lacey Uhlemeyer’s “Maintenance Required” (2025) is one of those thankless, dead-on-arrival romances that is neither spritzy nor plausible. Certain emotions are tapped that don’t quite register. What doesn’t work equally is a plot relying heavily on contrivances and forceful button-pushing to thrust a narrative into motion. But to make something like this flow and sing, the screenplay should first ensure its leads are sparkling and have a magnetic pull.
The script by the director leaves the bulk of it to its actors, who bring some heat, but it’s much too little, too late. It feels like minimal help when the film otherwise meanders and winds without any cohesive flow or intention. When the characters, the setting, and the rhythm itself feel so lost and sketchy, and purposeless, the film risks being caught off-stream.
This is what happens with “Maintenance Required,” that’s bold enough to merely coast off gestures and conceits in the genre’s earlier outings without caring to mark out its own voice or personality. There’s too much prototype crowding out any possible fresher slivers. It gets increasingly dull and trite and becomes the kind of stuff nobody’s asked for. Intelligence can barely be found as the film hurtles down nonsensical routes with a special affinity for recklessly insipid character decisions. You can never be invested in or believe these characters, let alone the road they take.
Maintenance Required (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
A film like this needs a pleasant sparring, a liveliness that rolls off the screen without the actors pushing, kneading it in. This absence mars the film continually, distracting with its routinely inane decisions, further sinking it. Where’s the sense of the world that the leads inhabit, the economic tension? It’s farcical, hence when the film positions an anti-capitalistic stance, it feels false. This is a nagging tendency of films and shows nowadays to weave in a certain woke slant while being plainly indifferent to the knots of dilemmas and crises that precipitate the central attitude.
Madelaine Petsch and Jacob Scipio drum up ardent sexual heat, but their performances sit detached from any convincing outer and inner reality. There’s a feeling that the whole material is too distended from the reach of actors, so they are barred from accessing, doing what they can with the little that exists for them. The plot struggles to justify itself, swirling in stubborn stagnation despite the pretence of a few key developments. It overexerts itself. There’s the conceit of the business rivalry between Petsch’s Charlie and Scipio’s Beau. But it never quite kicks into gear. There’s a lot of posturing, projecting the spite and ill will that predictably soften and make way for romance. It’s as disinterested and disingenuous as the efforts to make you root for them to be together.
When conflict rings so thin, the film has to seek strength elsewhere in snappy writing or sharp visuals or technical deftness to make you look elsewhere. The film goes nowhere on any count, further exacerbating the situation. Charlie drifts along, whittling away hours at the female-owned body that once belonged to her father. Of course, you can get the drift of the subversion here, painfully force-fitted into a woman sharpening her space in a patriarchally imagined setup.
But Charlie has her friends. She’s terrifically adept at her job, and she has Kam (Katy O’Brian) and Izzy (Madison Bailey), who dish out every suggestion under the sun, including starkly unsolicited ones. As long as the film skirts these women, there is an inoffensive chipper energy, a breeziness. Their conversations entail woes and commiserations over boyfriends, and the dialogue is enormously infused with life by O’Brian, who’s as reliable as ever.
Why doesn’t the duo meet?
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Charlie, however, comes off as too bland a character. She chafes at romance when it happens to her, pulling away from a possible spark. It’s a wariness that has settled deep. Petsch tries, but this is an impossible task. She has to lug along a character direly lacking in a solid backstory, something that also applies to Beau, who’s also a mechanic. Contexts don’t reverberate, which makes the film opaque and listless. Where’s the reason that fuels their actions? The film can never make either cleave into a compelling shape. What initially binds them is Bronco, a car belonging to her father that she has sought to restore. The duo decides not to share their names and identities.
Beau feels too generically plucked a character, one of those who fit in easily into a boys’ club, and is anchored by a power thirst. That’s the defining trait of Beau, who’s otherwise indecipherable or just a depthless character. Scipio has an arresting presence. He has great chemistry with Petsch, but frankly, this is wasted on a mindless, clueless film, where each turn is progressively disappointing and baffling.
Even as the dating stays online, it grows wildly far-fetched why it couldn’t hit the ground and materialise into a real relationship. Beau’s company is the competitor of Charlie’s. The film desperately tries to rake up the style quotient, making both its leads swanky as hell. But their jobs and pursuits run in bizarre dissonance. The strangeness shifts to bizarre, as characters keep deferring their meeting. Intrusions of reality and their postponements have never seemed as idiotic and whimsical, and random as they do in this film’s orchestrations.
Charlie has been in a quandary about whether to sell her father’s car to stave off debt. Beau is unhappy at his job, despite his obvious capitalist impulses. He quits his company since he’s already accumulated quite a lot. He doesn’t tell Charlie it’s him who’s been texting her all the time. Charlie gets increasingly disillusioned with her father’s shop, thinking she cannot move while she’s bound in. On Izzy’s suggestion and prompting, Charlie jumps into her long-held dream: a car restoration shop. Beau invites her to a car show, which she accepts.
Maintenance Required (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Do Charlie and Beau Reunite?
Once the car show gets over, the pair end up at his place, and things get snug. But Charlie is yet again tentative. Asking for the bathroom, she arrives at his garage, where she sees the car and discovers he’s been playing her. She feels immeasurably hurt and aghast, a betrayal that cuts deep. When she asks for explanations, he fumbles and doesn’t do a very good job of it, which alienates her and sharpens her defence mechanisms.
He pleads that he’d have told her at the right time, but she’s not persuaded at all. The pang of Beau and her business competitor being the same delivers a crushing blow, which demands due time and empathetic consideration. Too hurt, she runs out, determined that this relationship has been a deep, stinging lie that she should remove herself from immediately.
However, when you think this couldn’t get more contrived and laughably plotted, Charlie is overcome with a surge of missing and goes back to him. Hence, the two strike up a business collaboration, and there’s a perfect, happy ending for the couple, tiding over all past clashes and upsets. Revival Rides becomes their shared pursuit, and it seals them in a bond of nurturing respect and tenderness.
