What is with Hollywood’s recent fetish with animatronic vehicles? We’ve had Cars, and then Transformers, and now Herbie. No, the order of release isn’t important. It’s the fact that they’ve all been released at around the same time that matters, because hands up if you think the industry needs another trend to cash in on. Also, why cast Lindsay Lohan in a family movie, when there isn’t a day you don’t see reports of her crashing a car, or checking in and out of rebab? Why, was Hilary Duff too busy dressing up dolls to take up the role? I’m sorry, but Lohan + squeaky clean image will not stay put in my mind without me feeling something fishy’s going on.
Herbie is a cute little bug, perhaps too cute for anyone above the age of fifteen, and unless you grew up on the classic, Fully Loaded will pass as an overly cutsy movie too unbelievably smooth-sailing to gain any real insight from. No real hardship, no real characterisation, no real danger is Herbie. This magical car wants you to believe that it is capable of emotions by winking and performing feats you will find a hard time trying not to laugh at. He gets beaten and crushed and wrecked so very often in the movie, but why worry when you have a character like Justin Long, who’s always there to fix the bug with spare parts from the VW factory? Do the spare parts pose a danger to Herbie’s personality, once he is fitted like a jigsaw from leftovers in the garage? What really makes him tick? I’m not asking for an indept analysis as to how a ton of metal gained the ability to express itself, but Herbie is too much too puppetted to be a character I give a damn about.
Drowning in all-too-familiar stereotypes are the overprotective father, the humourous sidekick (who’s really nursing a crush on the lead character), and the overly obnoxious competition, NASCAR hotshot Tip Murphy, whose ego the size of America refuses to accept he got beat in a street race by something as shoddy as a VW Bug. I’d like to know how, too. It’s not like Herbie was fitted with the best engines, or whatever mechanical prop a vehicle needs to win races – yes, Herbie used to be a race car, but I find it hard to believe that having Justin Long tinkering around with the bug’s innards (or Lindsay Lohan behind the wheel) had a part to play in winning the race. I simply can’t suspend my belief in logic for that long. What I can believe, though, is that there’ll be those who’d find this enjoyable. It probably is, once you shut your mind off all logic and intelligence. Which seems to be the case for most family flicks, anyway.
(First published at InCinemas)
