The Valet earns its remake by understanding what made Francis Veber's 2006 French farce work in the first place: a fake relationship built on mutual desperation, played by two people who have every reason to resent the arrangement but don't. Eugenio Derbez plays Antonio, a parking valet recruited to pose as movie star Olivia's boyfriend to cover up her affair with a married real-estate mogul, and the film gets real mileage from the class gap between them rather than treating it as background noise.
Samara Weaving plays Olivia with more self-awareness than the setup requires, letting the character notice her own privilege instead of just serving as the fantasy love interest. Derbez, better known in the U.S. for broader comic roles, dials it down here, giving Antonio a quiet decency that makes the arrangement's inevitable complications land as something closer to real stakes than farce mechanics.
A fake relationship, a real class divide, and two people who accidentally start meaning it.
Director Richard Wong and writers Bob Fisher and Rob Greenberg — the team behind the 2018 Overboard remake — again took a foreign comedy and relocated its class dynamics, swapping Veber's Parisian setting for one built around Antonio's Mexican-American family and neighborhood in Los Angeles. The film is dedicated to Carmen Salinas, who plays Antonio's grandmother and died in December 2021, months before the film's release.
Reviews were solidly positive, with the film landing around 75% on Rotten Tomatoes; the site's own critical consensus called it a rare remake worth celebrating, crediting the chemistry between Derbez and Weaving. As a straight-to-Hulu release, it didn't chase box office numbers, but it gave Derbez one of his best-reviewed English-language star vehicles and reaffirmed Weaving's range outside of horror and genre work.
The film Antonio and Olivia's story is remaking had a life of its own well before Hulu picked up the English-language version. Francis Veber's 2006 original, La Doublure, opened in France with Gad Elmaleh in the valet role opposite Daniel Auteuil, Alice Taglioni, and Kristin Scott Thomas, and did solid if unspectacular business at home, grossing roughly $29 million against a reported $28.3 million budget — a modest hit rather than a blockbuster, which tracks with how Veber's farces have always worked: small, character-driven mix-ups rather than event filmmaking built for a wide release. The 2022 version keeps that same small-scale instinct even while relocating Veber's Parisian institutions to Los Angeles, rounding out Antonio's family and neighborhood with supporting turns from Amaury Nolasco and Noemi Gonzalez. That modesty is probably part of why it plays better as a low-key streaming discovery than it might have as a theatrical release chasing bigger numbers. Derbez, who has said he pursued an English-language version of the story for years, produced the remake himself through his own banner, 3Pas Studios, giving him more creative control over shepherding Veber's premise into a bilingual, Los Angeles setting than a typical starring role would allow.
