FilmSnobReviews

Title: The Valet
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Director: Richard Wong
Starring: Eugenio Derbez, Samara Weaving, Max Greenfield
Runtime: 2 hrs 4 mins

What It Is: Antonio Flores (Derbez) is a mild-mannered valet in Los Angeles. Olivia Allan (Weaving) is a popular, rich, and famous actress. When Olivia gets caught outside a Los Angeles hotel with married real estate titan Vincent Royce. (Greenfield) Royce starts to spin a yarn about Olivia and Antonio being a couple to deflect that negative attention away from him. When Olivia agrees to this they begin to pretend to be a couple. But will it work? Will anyone actually believe it?

What We Think: This is certainly far FAR too predictable. Wong’s previous work Come As You Are is a far more charming affair. Derbez has sort of fallen nicely into this niche of being in these very terrible pseudo-romantic films. Samara Weaving is fine here. Max Greenfield is sort of chewing all the scenery everywhere he’s in this thing. There’s really no reason for this film to be over 2 hours long. It’s inexcusable really. You can chop twenty minutes out of this without missing much. It may actually have better pacing with that extra time taken out. For his work here Wong is fine. There’s really nothing done here that will change opinion from a camera movement or shot selection perspective.

Our Grade: C-, Another incident of a streaming original being more the former and not enough of the latter. What helps this is that the film’s heart is in the right place and you can feel it permeating throughout. The film is alive, sort of, and it features plenty to like from a casual movie viewing point of view. Hulu definitely needs to do better with its originals. Something tells me they just might figure it out. Who knows though, maybe we’ll get more of this.