Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Angela Robinson
Cast :
Lindsay Lohan……….Maggie Peyton
Michael Keaton……….Ray Peyton Sr.
Matt Dillon……….Trip Murphy
Breckin Meyer……….Ray Peyton Jr.
Justin Long……….Kevin
Cheryl Hines……….Sally
Jimmi Simpson……….Crash
Jill Ritchie……….Charisma
Thomas Lennon……….Larry Murphy
Jeremy Roberts……….Crazy Dave
E.E. Bell……….Beeman
Peter Pasco……….Juan Hernandez
Mario Larraza……….Miguel Hernandez
Patrick Cranshaw……….Jimmy D.
Scoot McNairy……….Augie
Being in Lindsay Lohan’s position in the movie industry is a double-edged sword. On the one hand she can make variants of the same movie repeatedly, as sticking to formula and cheap gags has made her fabulously wealthy. It also has a built in audience of girls who flock to her movies, music albums and public appearances.
But on the other hand being the star of formulaic movies designed for teenagers only has a certain shelf-life. Eventually she is going to either fade away like so many other former teen movie stars of the past or springboard into a serious acting career.
But that day is not here yet as Lohan takes another stab at remaking an older movie (she previously starred in a remake of The Parent Trap) and gets behind the wheel of a Volkswagen bug.
Lohan teams up with Herbie the love bug in another entry into one of Disney’s signature franchises in Herbie: Fully Loaded. Lohan stars as Maggie Peyton. She is the latest generation of a legendary car racing family whose latest edition Ray Jr. (Breckin Meyer) isn’t quite up to snuff as the surname implies. She’s also a former street racer, having given it up after a crash and the subsequent promise to her father to stop.
But this promise isn’t meant to stay as the racing itch gets to Maggie as she coincidentally discovers Herbie. This latest entry into the franchise combines the underdog story of so many sports movies before and comes out with a movie that’s a second rate version of Days of Thunder, except with less emotional depth or acting prowess.
This isn’t a remake as it as a continuation of the franchise; Herbie: Fully Loaded is an extension of the sort of adventures in love and racing that was the premise of the original franchise. This was never high level entertainment but there is a certain sort of giddy fun in the franchise past that this movie is lacking.
This lack of fun is mixed and matched with the prerequisite underdog storyline, thrown in with an uneven performance from Matt Dillon as the villainous Trip Murphy as its sole highlight and you’re left with a gut-wrenchingly bad story so cliché and formula that even the dialogue is easy to predict.
To say that you can predict each successive event in this story is one of the understatements of the year. This is a movie that lives and dies in a strict formula and that follows it all costs but the problem is that the story behind the formula has so little life to it that the formula becomes the story. The events aren’t parts of the story but just randomly inserted so that certain points of the story get covered. They are devoid of any of drama or emotion.
It’s paint by numbers in the truest sense; Angela Robinson seems to have decided that a certain scene was needed and just grabbed a stock scene from any number of underdog stories over the years then just added NASCAR into the background and a magical VW Beatle into the foreground.
As uninspiring as the story is the acting. Coaxing a magical performance out of Lindsay Lohan may be something not plausible now, but when the material she and the cast are given to work with is shoddy even mediocre performances are out of the question. While Dillon hams it up, his performance being a refresher from the cardboard insertions of underdog movie archetypes, his material isn’t good. At points he’s relatively entertaining, but he’s hampered by the material he’s been given with.
The humor is either too easy, as Herbie attacking Dillon or anyone else human falls flat because it are easily foreseeable at best and unfunny at worst, or are just insultingly bad.
This isn’t a very enjoyable movie from either an acting or story point; the lone highlight is the revamped little Beatle himself.
Herbie wasn’t changed aesthetically, which is refreshing. Considering that newer lines of the VW Beatle have been released since the last time Herbie graced the screen it is nice to see that the one thing about Herbie that would seem almost natural to be changed is thankfully left alone. It’s the same older version the Beatle and that is one thing that helps lend it some credibility; this isn’t some 2001 VW, it’s the real deal. Maggie discovering a brand new Beatle under dust would be a lot less plausible than finding the older version of the Love Bug under soot and dust.
He also has the same sort of feisty attitude as he did in prior incarnations, but at the same time they toy with some of the specifics of what Herbie is in a mind-boggling way. Herbie in his prior incarnations was a love bug but didn’t show any sort of low-brow tendencies. The sort of crude humor that makes up key portions of Herbie’s comedy bits feel out of place and forced, taking innocent fun and turning it into something that’s uncomfortable to watch.
