The Valet debuts on Hulu on May 20, 2022.
Hulu comedy The Valet has the misfortune of being saddled with a nigh-unwatchable trailer, filled with punchlines that will, at best, induce silence, and at worst yield protracted sighs. The film itself has slightly more to offer, as a tale of a working-class Mexican valet who gets roped into the limelight alongside a famous Hollywood actress — but at nearly two hours in length, the final product feels punishing for different reasons. For one thing, it’s yet another horrid misuse of its star, Eugenio Derbez; for another, it tries to paste themes of culture and humanity onto a deeply absurd story. The idea isn’t inherently unworkable, but here, it’s a clash the movie can’t sustain.
It follows Antonio (Derbez), a down-on-his-luck Mexican immigrant on the verge of divorce who parks fancy cars for the L.A. elite. In a matter of happenstance — which, despite unfolding outside an upscale Hollywood hotel, has nothing to do with Antonio’s job at a fancy restaurant elsewhere — the lowly valet finds himself photographed by the paparazzi just as Hollywood superstar Olivia Allan (Samara Weaving) has a public spat with her secret lover, Vincent Royce (Max Greenfield), a married politician. To quell rumors of their affair, and to appease Vincent’s suspecting wife, Kathryn (Betsy Brandt), the illicit couple concocts a plan to have Antonio pose as Allan’s boyfriend, to which Antonio agrees, if only because the fee for this ruse might help his soon-to-be ex-wife, Isabel (Marisol Nichols), pay off some debts, which could in turn help win her back.
If the premise sounds like a farce, that’s an apt description of the 2006 French comedy on which it’s based, La Doublure by Francis Veber. However, The Valet attempts to take a more thoughtful approach to Veber’s class satire by injecting it with sincere sentiment and a half-baked story of Latin American culture in Los Angeles, which ends up little more than window dressing. La Doublure’s trio of Indian remakes, in Hindi, Bengali, and Punjabi, may not have broken new ground, but in following the original’s outline to a tee, they ensured a winning formula. Where they expanded on the original’s mere 86-minute runtime with a few escapist musical numbers, The Valet strings together an additional half hour out of practically nothing — save for a deathly serious third act detour, which is technically something new, but it ends up having little impact on its central story.
Antonio is halfway between a know-nothing buffoon and a well-meaning father and husband, but these two halves of the character feel irreconcilable. He isn’t one person with multifaceted traits, so much as he is a broad comedic outline that swings wildly between these modes depending on what kind of punchline the script demands. Derbez, of course, performs adequately, but his role falls more under the category of pithy nonsense like the one he had in How to Be a Latin Lover, rather than the likes of Best Picture winner CODA, which offered him the chance to be both funny and fully human.
This two-dimensional approach is applied to Greenfield’s Vincent too, a delightfully jealous villain who feels borrowed from the brain of Michael Showalter. But where this simplistic, farcical approach breaks down is in The Valet’s attempts to zone in on more complicated nuances, for characters like Weaving’s lonely Olivia, a pill-popping celebrity desperate to connect with anyone but her PR inner circle. The Antonio ploy finally offers her the chance, and Weaving makes a meal out of emotional scraps when she’s introduced to Antonio’s family, but she’s also saddled with the overwhelming majority of the film’s human scope. On the other hand, Derbez has the lion’s share of the comedic moments, usually born from the class disconnect between the unlikely duo, but each scene is strung together with such low energy, and such little thought for comedic or dramatic rhythm, that it feels like watching an assembly cut (one wonders if the film wasn’t edited to a laugh track).
The Valet’s conception of Los Angeles is just as sluggish. Its fleeting shots of lively Korean and Hispanic neighborhoods, meant to inject life into the frame (in contrast to the manufactured allure of stardom), are too brief and distant for a tale of the city’s disparate cultural elements being forced into contact; Olivia is, once again, tasked with providing this thematic contrast all on her own, since we meet no one else of her stature and barely interact with her world. Antonio becomes a local hero of sorts for dating a wealthy white woman, but rather than this plot point being treated with either outright comedic absurdity or a satirical eye, it's left hanging in a strange, disconcerting space somewhere in between, where the film can’t quite figure out how reconcile the original (all-white) story with this new racially specific premise.
A few subplots offer occasional promise — when Olivia interacts with Antonio’s wide-eyed Hispanic coworkers, or when Antonio’s mother begins a sweet romance with her eldery Korean landlord, both of which prove to be delectable comedic garnishing — but these lively characters, and their perspectives on love, fame, and everything else the film is actually about, end up being swept under the rug with a quickness. Unfolding plot points, whether tragic or comedic, simply circle the central duo and their unlikely camaraderie, seldom affecting how close they become, why they grow apart, or why they eventually re-enter each other’s orbits. It’s a rom-com of sorts that can’t seem to commit to any romantic or comedic idea, whether borrowed from the original film or invented whole cloth for this one.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/JetRN6W
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