 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Herbie: Fully Loaded
|
 |
|
When
I was ten years old, I thought The Love
Bug (Robert Stevenson, 1969), a comedy about a car named Herbie, was the
greatest film in the world. This undoubtedly had something to do with the high
esteem in which my family held the Volkswagen.
Angela
Robinson’s Herbie: Fully Loaded is a
film to delight all children, and make any impressionable adult regress. It
begins like gangbusters with a credit sequence mixing Pop Art graphics and a
frenetic montage of every memorable action moment from every previous Herbie
movie (there are four theatrical features in the series before this one, not to
mention TV spin-offs).
Once
we settle into the plot, we discover that Maggie (Lindsay Lohan at her best)
has been excluded from the professional world of NASCAR by her car-obsessed
father, Ray Sr (Michael Keaton). He wants to protect his little girl, and
instead grooms the hopeless Ray Jr (Breckin Meyer) for a success he will never
achieve.
However,
Herbie – delegated to a junkyard and earmarked for the crushing machine – takes
both his own destiny and Maggie’s in hand. Soon she is racing the dastardly
Trip (Matt Dillon) on the track, while attempting to hide her identity (and her
gender) under a helmet. This masquerade is the most contrived element of the
story, but at least it leads to an emotionally satisfying Girl Power ending.
Robinson
was an intriguing choice for director here. Associated with the queer cinema
movement, her D.E.B.S. (2004) is among
the best and most ingeniously subversive teen-action comedies of the 21st
century so far. The material of Herbie:
Fully Loaded doesn’t quite rise to the occasion of Robinson’s best and
cheekiest talents, but it certainly adds another string to her bow, as she
works across everything from web series to mainstream film and TV genres.
As
usual, Herbie proves to be a histrionic and, in fact, rather libidinal
creature. His doors whack people who insult him, his headlights blink like
eyes, he revs his motor whenever a nice-looking female car drives past. All
this cartoonish stuff is vigorously underlined in the musical score by Mark
Mothersbaugh – a composer whose previous work with Devo and Wes Anderson makes him
the ideal candidate for the job.
The
difference between the old and new Herbie movies is, of course, digital special
effects. Previous instalments featured old-fashioned stunt work; now, every
gravity-defying feat of which this car is capable looks like a sleek, unreal
piece of animation (especially in a hilarious Demolition Derby scene).
However,
no amount of blatant technical artifice can distract from Lohan’s beaming,
perky charm here; she has rarely been this good in movies. To appropriate a
Neil Young/Stephen Stills song anthem: long may she – and Herbie, too – run!
|
