Maintenance Required (2025) Movie Review: When the Film Itself Needed Servicing

They called it “Maintenance Required,” but no amount of repair work could fix this cinematic breakdown. Madelaine Petsch and Jacob Scipio have somehow managed to produce what might be the most uninspired homage to “You’ve Got Mail” ever conceived– without even bothering to credit the 1998 rom-com for gifting them its entire narrative skeleton. The least one could expect, after being handed a ready-made emotional blueprint on a silver platter, is something charming or refreshing. Instead, by the time the credits rolled, the only thing I wanted to ‘maintain’ was distance.

Charlotte (Charlie) O’Malley, played by Petsch, is the owner of an all-female-run mechanic shop in Oakland– beloved by the local community, known for her work ethic, and apparently allergic to romance. She’s the classic rom-com protagonist: fiercely independent but secretly lonely. Her friends insist she put herself out there; she insists she’s fine as she is. But, of course, there’s a twist, or at least the film thinks there is. Charlie has been anonymously chatting with an online stranger over their shared love for cars. They have rules: no real names, no personal details, no crossing boundaries. It’s digital companionship at its safest– until a corporate auto-shop competitor called ‘The Miller Boys’ opens across the street. Their golden boy, Beau, threatens Charlie’s business… and, surprise, surprise, he’s also the man behind her screen, keeping her up at night, to chat about cars.

What unfolds is supposed to be an enemies-to-lovers story about rivalry, trust, and modern connection, but it barely holds up. By the 45-minute mark, it’s painfully clear how it will end. And so, as an act of kindness to your time and your WiFi, let me confirm it for you: Yes, they do make it through their differences. No, it isn’t worth the emotional investment.

The film’s biggest flaw lies not in its predictability but in its irrelevance. “You’ve Got Mail” was iconic because it was the first of its kind– an intersection of love and technology that felt novel. Recreating that same story nearly three decades later, when dating apps and anonymous DMs are a daily routine, feels tone-deaf at best, lazy at worst. The script desperately tries to modernize the premise, but ends up feeling like a TikTok micro-drama stretched into a feature-length ordeal. And the irony? Most TikTok micro-dramas have better pacing, writing, and emotional payoff.

From a writing perspective, the dialogue is dead on arrival. Not because the actors lack delivery skills, but because the lines themselves are painfully undercooked. The conversations between Charlie and Beau are meant to feel flirtatious and quick-witted, but they read like outtakes from a badly written Wattpad story. A random “Ooh… that was naughty” during game night made me audibly cringe– it’s an attempt at flirtation that lands squarely in parody territory. The back-and-forths are repetitive and hollow, making their supposed chemistry hard to buy. And though the runtime clocks in at a reasonable 1 hour and 45 minutes, it feels much longer, thanks to unnecessary subplots, indulgent montages, and a narrative rhythm that is flatter than the film’s emotional arcs.

But perhaps what’s most baffling about “Maintenance Required” is its confused sense of feminism. It positions itself as a “female empowerment” film, but undermines that message at every turn. Charlie is presented as a headstrong, passionate mechanic breaking barriers in a male-dominated industry, but for ninety percent of the runtime, she’s crying over Beau, doubting herself because of Beau, or trying to move on from Beau. For a woman supposedly defined by her career, we learn almost nothing about her actual craft. Where are the sequences that show her geeking out over engines or breaking down technical challenges? Instead, we get the obligatory “grease smudge on the cheek” shot and a few scenes of her tightening bolts while her clothes remain suspiciously spotless.

It’s a pity, because the concept had real potential: a woman redefining femininity in a masculine world. And to the film’s credit, there’s one shining example of that done right– Izzy, Charlie’s manager and nail artist. Izzy pampers customers with creative manicures while the rest of the team works on cars, turning the garage into a hybrid space of self-care and mechanical work. It’s clever. It’s layered and allows women to occupy a male-coded space without erasing their femininity. There’s something quietly powerful about a woman filing nails and fixing engines in the same frame: it’s an act of subtle rebellion, a reclaiming of identity. Unfortunately, that nuance doesn’t extend to the rest of the film. Izzy’s subplot, which could have been a fascinating commentary on the intersection of beauty and utility, is brushed aside for yet another round of Charlie and Beau’s will-they-won’t-they melodrama.

Then comes the film’s other “bold” feminist statement– Charlie’s wardrobe. And here’s where “Maintenance Required” completely loses its footing. Free the nipple? Absolutely. But perhaps not during a business meeting. There’s a fine line between dressing freely and dressing for the occasion, and the film blurs that line beyond recognition. “Maintenance Required” wants to celebrate agency, but in trying too hard to appear woke, it becomes tone-deaf to nuance.

Maintenance Required (2025) Movie — A still from Maintenance Required (2025)

The irony is that “Maintenance Required” seems obsessed with sounding woke. It throws around buzzwords– capitalism, feminism, independence, emotional labor, gender bias– as though simply naming the “isms” will make the story profound. It doesn’t. A character can rant about how corporations destroy local businesses or how women are constantly underestimated, but if the film doesn’t show these conflicts through action, all we’re left with is shallow posturing. It’s as if the scriptwriters thought inserting one emotionally charged monologue per act would make their film politically aware. Instead, it exposes how surface-level their understanding really is.

The same problem plagues the love story. In trying to juggle empowerment, rivalry, and romance, the film ends up accomplishing none. The chemistry that initially sparks between Petsch and Scipio fizzles out midway through, crushed under repetitive fights and reconciliations. What begins as tension soon devolves into exhaustion. After a point, watching them together feels less like watching two people in love and more like watching two people trapped in a cycle of performative affection.

And that’s the heart of what’s wrong with “Maintenance Required”: it mistakes appearance for depth. It’s all shine, no structure. The story wants to be profound, but it’s built on half-formed ideas about gender, power, and love. There’s no authenticity, no texture, just a checklist of “modern rom-com” ingredients assembled without understanding why they work.

If rom-coms of the late nineties thrived on sincerity, today’s ones thrive on irony, and “Maintenance Required” falls awkwardly in between– too self-serious to be fun, too shallow to be moving. It mistakes nostalgia for originality, empowerment for aesthetic, and chemistry for convenience. Every scene screams “we’re saying something important!” while saying absolutely nothing at all. If love is an engine that keeps cinema running, “Maintenance Required” is one that’s long run out of oil, and no amount of tinkering can bring it back to life.