Review: Herbie: Fully Loaded

Herbie: Fully Loaded has all of the visual color and vibrancy as Millions, but none of the emotional or narrative depth. Starring Lindsay Lohan as Maggie Peyton, a recent college graduate who is given the choice of a car from a local impound by her father (Michael Keaton), only to find everyone’s favorite famous VW bug from the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s, it’s perky and sugary but not very easily consumable. Herbie: Fully Loaded is the perfect example of how a visually energetic film can be utter dullsville to watch. Once Maggie learns that the car that she picks out is actually named Herbie and possesses extreme racing power, the movie takes to cliché. Maggie and Herbie begin to enter street races secretly; for plot-convenience’s sake, it just so happens that she was almost killed in one of these in the past, and if Dad were ever to find out that she was racing again, he would have her head. The movie’s plot escalates as it moves along and, in the third-act, Maggie finds herself racing Herbie in a real NASCAR competition.

The movie’s director is Angela Robinson, whose super-spy parody D.E.B.S. currently sits at #3 on my “Worst Movies of the Year” list and doesn’t look like it’s about to come off anytime soon. Here, she has a greater command for creating a playful atmosphere than she did in that film, but her work still leaves much to be desired. Herbie: Fully Loaded is a gimmick-movie and Robinson does nothing to make it come off as more pure; everything about it is insincere, right on down to Lohan’s ginormous—but still supposedly CGI-deflated—breasts. I’m all for making contrived films—as long as they’re pleasant and fun, the specifics don’t really bother me—but there is no point behind this one. Kids’ time is better spent watching better movies with similar plots. The only thing that adults have any possibility of enjoying in the movie is the nostalgia-factor of being able to reminisce about Herbie’s good ‘ol days. Herbie: Fully Loaded might be mildly diverting when it plays on HBO in the future, but for the $30 it costs a family of four to buy tickets to see it and the potentially even more expensive visit to the concession-stand, it’s not worth dedicating a night at the movies to.