1239. Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005)

Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Michael Keaton, Matt Dillon

Director: Angela Robinson

Running Time: 100 mins

Herbie: Fully Loaded is an American film and the fifth in the Herbie franchise. Years after his last race, Herbie is now rusted, and on the verge of being crushed. However, a young woman from a racing family buys him and sets about repairing Herbie to make him ready for racing once again.

Wow. This is a bad movie. Based on the insanely adorable character that we’ve loved since The Love Bug in 1968, Herbie: Fully Loaded completely strips all of the charm and enjoyability out of Herbie, and throws him into a mechanical, generic and completely soulless Disney movie, with no laughs and no enjoyability at all.

Before we get into what’s so wrong with this movie, however, I want to point out that it’s not all bad. For one, Angela Robinson’s direction is pretty good. The actual racing scenes are energetic and a much more fun than the rest of the movie, whilst the film in general isn’t too ugly. It’s pretty slick, and for that, I shouldn’t be too harsh.

What’s more is that the soundtrack is great too. That’s not a particularly important part of the movie, but in some of the montage sequences, hit pop songs like ‘It’s Magic’, ‘More Than A Feeling’ and ‘Born To Be Wild’ do inject a little more fun and enjoyability into otherwise dull scenes.

But that’s it, the rest of this film is appalling. What’s most disappointing is the fact that you have to sit through a film based on a loveable character that just has no soul. The atrocious CGI Herbie in some scenes sums up perfectly the fact that he’s nowhere near as loveable as the classics, and that extends to the rest of the film, where awful comedy and pretty lacklustre acting all come together to make a very lifeless and dull film.

As always, you can make the argument that this is just a kids’ movie. Yes, and I do remember seeing this as a kid, and feeling pretty lukewarm about it. It’s got that insanely generic live-action Disney story, and it feels like certain scenes are almost copy and pasted from other similar movies.

Yes, it’s a kids’ movie, and yes, it won’t be as insufferable and hateful for kids, but even so, a film with such poor comedy and lack of loveability (Herbie should be way cuter than he is in this movie) really doesn’t deserve your time, and that’s why I’m giving Herbie: Fully Loaded a 4.4.