Herbie: Fully Loaded
Disney has gone back to the cedar closet again and come out with "Herbie: Fully Loaded," a remake of the studio's goofy polyester-era series about a Volkswagen bug with a mischievous soul. Fully loaded with what? you may ask. Product placement, as far as I can tell. Like the recent "Freaky Friday" redo, the movie stars Lindsay Lohan, but unlike "Friday," there's no Jamie Lee Curtis to provide any real zip. Instead, we're given Michael Keaton in a mopey-widower role that negates his gift for comedy, Matt Dillon squandering his talent as a fatuous bad guy, and a car with an attitude problem. Where's Dean Jones when you really need him?
Let it go on the record that the critic's wife and daughters and daughters' friends and daughters' friends' parents were each of the opinion that the new "Herbie" was "better than I expected," perhaps because recent tabloid reports had led them to expect Lohan to stagger in front of the camera blind drunk, shriek obscenities, and collapse from anorectic heart failure. She doesn't; in fact, she's as gruffly engaging as ever -- Hilary Duff with a spine.
As for the critic, who tries to avoid gossip and focus on the movie at hand (discount those Internet rumors that Lohan had her bust digitally reduced in the editing room!), he found "Herbie: Fully Loaded" exactly as blandly noisy and inoffensively average as he thought it might be. So there's something to be said for lowering your expectations.
Lohan is cast as Maggie Peyton, just-graduated daughter of Ray Peyton Sr. (Keaton), a former stock-car racer who has pinned his hopes on hapless Ray Jr. (Breckin Meyer). Maggie loves to race, but dad won't let her since his wife's death. (Yes, another Disney movie with a dead mom -- has the entire story department considered therapy?) She comes across Herbie in a scrapyard and saves the aging Beetle from being junked; soon he's showing her his need for speed.
"Fully Loaded" is lucky enough to be about a woman racer at the exact moment the topic is in the news with Danica Patrick's fourth-place showing at the Indianapolis 500, and the script gets in some pro forma equal-opportunity plugs. There's also a sweet young mechanic (Justin Long, from TV's "Ed") who gets under the hood (Herbie's, not Maggie's), the heroine's obnoxious Val-gal best friend (Jill Ritchie), and a preening race champion named Trip Murphy (Dillon) who gets smoked by Herbie in a street race and spends the rest of the movie plotting revenge.
It's all cute enough, and the bits where Herbie squirts oil on people or rolls his headlights in disgust make the kids laugh. A demolition derby sequence in which the bug is almost crushed by a snorting monster truck is fairly nightmarish, though, and good luck explaining why Herbie's antenna goes sproing when he sees a shapely yellow new-model Volkswagen.
"Fully Loaded" is only interesting on a grown-up level because it isn't just a remake of a Disney movie from the past -- it is a Disney movie from the past. The songs studding the soundtrack are classic-radio fist-pumpers -- "More Than a Feeling," "Magic," "Working for the Weekend" -- and the photography has the grainy, washed-out West Coast sunlight of vintage '75 Roger Corman. The projection behind Lohan in the driving scenes reaches back even further: It would do Tippi Hedren in "The Birds" proud.
The only thing that marks "Fully Loaded" as part of the here and now is its worship for all things NASCAR. The film was shot at the California Speedway, and a bevy of real-life racers turns up in cameos: Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, and others whose names will mean nothing or everything to you. Where the races in the old "Herbie" movies were slapstick affairs, the climax here is reverential, with cars hitting the track in slow-motion, to trumpet fanfares. "Fully Loaded" becomes more about the race than about Herbie, and that can't be right.
But you can see why Disney -- and Hollywood in general -- would be drawn to NASCAR racing, since the sport takes the possibilities for product placement to unheard-of heights. Because cars and racers are plastered with the names of their sponsors, every shot becomes an ad. Dillon's Trip Murphy shills for Cheetos simply by walking into frame; a lineup of cars at the starting gate is a paean to Home Depot and UPS. The very name of the race -- the Nextel Cup -- has been sold.
Maybe this is pointless carping to racing fans, but for a parent whose children have advertising stuffed down their throats from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep, it's a distress signal. At least Herbie retains his innocence in this and other matters -- but the way he's looking at the yellow Beetle has me worried.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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