The Valet

  • 18 Jun - 24 Jun, 2022
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Reviews

Antonio (Derbez) is a mega-doofus. He often has a wide-eyed expression on his face that tells us he’s in a state of befuddled paralysis. He rides his bike to school to pick up his teenage son, who hops on the back and somehow doesn’t seem to be mortified by it. He lives with his elderly mother (Carmen Salinas). He carries a hopeless torch for his estranged wife, Isabel (Marisol Nichols), who breaks it to him that she’s dating someone else. But Antonio works hard and is a good man although sometimes he acts a little too much like Mr Bean.

Elsewhere in Los Angeles, a man named Vincent (Max Greenfield) enjoys a clandestine hotel-room tryst with Olivia Allan (Weaving). He’s a fail son-in-law who married into a billionaire family and works as a developer who’s going to gentrify the living crap out of Antonio’s neighbourhood. She’s a highfalutin movie star on the cusp of releasing an Amelia Earhart biopic, and she’s waiting for Vincent to divorce his wife, Kathryn (Betsy Brandt), so they can stop sneaking around. They argue and it spills out into the street when fate puts Antonio in the middle of a juicy Vincent-Olivia paparazzi photo, which TMZ exploits for a zillion page views. Vincent fears losing his stake in the billionaire fortune, so he goes into damage control mode to hide his extramarital activity and curtail a scandal that would totally derail Olivia’s Earhart movie: He hires Antonio to pretend to be Olivia’s lover. Antonio agrees, but instead of asking for, we don’t know, $150k, which he could totally get, he wants $12,850, which would pay off his ex-wife’s college tuition debt.

As you might predict, the scenario finds Antonio Mr Beaning his way down red carpets, chowing down on free limo food, sweating profusely as Olivia kisses him in public, and being mistaken for the waitstaff at fancy parties. Olivia comes off a bit standoffish, but soon warms up to Antonio; she’s lonely and isolated and finds the warmth of Antonio’s omnipresent extended family endearing. Meanwhile, Kathryn knows she’s married to a weasel she can’t trust, and hires a slob private detective to follow the slob private detective Vincent hired to follow Olivia. Are Antonio and Olivia really going to fall in love and bridge the slob-snob divide? No frickin’ way!

– Compilation

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