The latest of the many adaptations of the 1937 Hungarian play Parfumerie is Maintenance Required, a romantic comedy set inside two rival body shops. The other adaptations include The Shop Around the Corner from 1940, the early career masterpiece from that King of the Light Touch, Ernst Lubitsch, whose Jimmy Stewart-led comedy takes place inside a leather goods shop in pre-war Budapest, where two employees who seemingly hate each other have actually been falling in love through a letter correspondence, not realizing their coworker is actually the love of their life.

The other prominent adaptation is You’ve Got Mail with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, which took Lubitsch’s story and set it inside two warring bookstores. On the one hand, an independently owned beloved local haunt, and the other an Amazon-like behemoth. Maintenance Required is certainly aware of its lineage, with multiple references to both of those films, but Lacey Uhlmeyer’s film has neither the comic lightness of Lubitsch, nor Nora Ephron’s innate understanding of character. Seemingly pitched as an update on a classic tale, it is instead a clunky downgrade on a trusted formula, misunderstanding what made its predecessors so special.

Maintenance Required Has No Engine Except Sexual Chemistry

Its biggest issue stems first and foremost from two absurdly drawn characters, whose interest in each other seems mostly unmotivated. Charlotte, or more commonly known amongst her friends, Charlie (Riverdale‘s Madelaine Petsch), spends nearly all of her time inside the female-owned and operated body shop that once belonged to her father. O’Malley’s is an Oakland staple, where many female customers feel especially well cared for in an environment that can so often feel catered solely to men. While she fixes cars in a jiffy alongside her best friend Kam (Katy O’Brian), her receptionist Izzy (Madison Bailey) paints nails and offers makeup advice.

Much of the film’s strengths lie in the natural, easy chemistry between the three women who run the shop, with lots of raunchy banter that keeps many scenes clipping along at an enjoyable pace. Kam is a social butterfly whose endless stream of ridiculously hot boyfriends seems never-ending; Izzy is a natural conversationalist with Charlie’s clientele. But it is the latter who is caught adrift in Erin Falconer, Roo Berry, and Uhlmeyer’s co-written script, as the protagonist never quite comes off as the grease monkey she is written to be.

Petsch is delightful, charming, and alluring, but her character is consistently in makeup and costuming that suggest someone much more ready to be noticed than the dialogue she is given. Perhaps that is intentional in illustrating a young woman who is shut off from her own innate desires, but when a woman waiting for a manicure at the front desk tells Izzy that Charlie can “go first,” mistaking the car shop owner as a fellow client, it rings absurdly hollow; Charlie looks like a million bucks. Petsch is frankly never readable as a shut-in who is uncomfortable with flirtation.

Regardless, Charlie continues the day-to-day operations of her shop and spends her off-hours working tirelessly to restore the Bronco that once belonged to her father, whom she has named Marge. And in those late-night repair sessions, she corresponds with Beau (Jacob Scipio), a fellow mechanic and Bronco enthusiast from across the Bay, whose name and identity she does not know.

Part of the premise relies on Beau and Charlie having agreed not to share any names or any revealing information that would reveal their real-life identities, but this extremely convenient plot point is never given much shrift except as a way of illustrating how Charlie has sworn off the attention of men (but then one wonders why she is spending so much time talking to one in an anonymous forum).

In You’ve Got Mail, much of Ephron’s dialogue is given to us in voice-over readings of their emails to each other, and Uhlmeyer goes for a similar technique. But the voice-overs, ideally, should reveal something about the characters that we might not otherwise get. The vast majority of the messages here elicit only an eye roll of recognition. Yes, we know that working on Marge makes you feel close to your dead father.

If Charlie’s character is inconsistent, Beau’s is unrecognizable as a coherent human being. Which isn’t necessarily Scipio’s fault. In fact, all the scenes between Petsch and Scipio are brimming with a palpable sexual chemistry, even when their dialogue is absurd and frustrating. Scipio is likable, but Beau is not. A bullish capitalist shark who works as the “closer” for the Miller Boys (think Pep Boys, only ruthless), a conglomerate run by Jim Gaffigan’s Mr. Miller, Beau is somehow written as a blue-collar car nut from Fresno and a Patrick Bateman-style hound whose pursuit of money is only exceeded by his lust for power.

Uhlmeyer and company have written an extremely bizarre personality whose contradictions would be interesting if we could sympathize with his internal dilemmas. But he doesn’t seem to have much confusion about who he is until he realizes the woman he loves is actually the woman he’s competing with. Mr. Miller has sent Beau to set up a new Miller Boys location directly across the street from O’Malley’s, which is cruel enough, but it is Beau who takes delight in telling his employees about the beauty of price manipulation.

…the film is as sputtery as an old car on the fritz, failing to update its cinematic lineage in any conceivably positive way.

It certainly doesn’t help that Gaffigan’s corporate entity is so cartoonishly evil that it suggests Will Ferrell’s Mattel boss from Barbie by way of Austin Powers‘s Dr. Evil. Gaffigan is perpetually flanked by two blondes who blow smoke, and Beau seems absolutely unbothered at the idea of coldly taking down locally owned businesses in pursuit of profit. The only aspect of Beau’s character that is likable is that he harbors a business idea of revamping old cars as electric vehicles, which is weakly supposed to suggest the man is more of an artist than a capitalist.

It never gets easier to buy these characters or their circumstances. Matteo Lane plays Beau’s best friend, and when the two are together, Beau is further transformed as a stylish culture vulture. Yes, people can contain multitudes, but if everyone is a unicorn, is anyone really real? The person Beau is in messages with Charlie is wildly different from real-life Beau, at times advocating for Charlie to stick it to the corporate rival she’s facing, a directly oppositional stance to the one he takes in conversation with her face-to-face.

All that makes it all the more enraging when Beau condescendingly suggests that Charlie is being fake after an argument at the bar. But Beau is the one who is actively gaslighting her. It’s very hard to root for a romance where one of the paramours is certifiably awful.

If Lubitsch’s film was about the distinct perspectives of the European middle class, and Ephron’s was about finding love amidst the corporatization of art, it’s difficult to pin down what Uhlmeyer’s Maintenance Required is doing that is of substance at all. Petsch and Scipio are both extremely attractive and breezy performers, but, the film is as sputtery as an old car on the fritz, failing to update its cinematic lineage in any conceivably positive way.

Maintenance Required is now streaming on Prime Video.