June 22, 2005

HERBIE: FULLY LOADED is the sixth motion picture in Walt Disney’s Herbie i.p. franchise saga (following THE LOVE BUG [1968], HERBIE RIDES AGAIN [1974], HERBIE GOES TO MONTE CARLO [1977], HERBIE GOES BANANAS [1980] and DISNEY’S THE LOVE BUG [1997]). It’s a sequel, not a reboot like BATMAN BEGINS, because the opening credits feature clips from some of those movies as backstory.

The story proper starts like a normal Herbie movie, with the lovable anthropomorphic (but not talking) Volkswagen Beetle with the #53 on his side causing trouble at the junkyard he’s been dumped off in. When Ray Peyton Sr. (Michael Keaton, FIRST DAUGHTER), leader of the Bass Pro Shop NASCAR team brings his daughter Maggie (Lindsay Lohan a year after MEAN GIRLS) there to buy a fixer-upper as a college graduation gift she ends up owning and restoring Herbie (due to wacky Herbie mischief).

This version of Herbie can blink his headlights, curve his bumper into a smile, rock back and forth when he’s excited, and other things that no humans seem to notice. Some of his movement might be done mechanically, but mostly it appears to be computer generated – I thought of it as being like in BABE how they often animate the mouths of real animals. The visual effects are fine by the standards of 2005, obviously fake looking now, but so are the matte effects in the original Herbie movies, as the opening credits reminded us.

The modern twist is that it takes place in the world of NASCAR (with tons of cameos by what are clearly famous drivers and/or their cars), and also THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS style street racing. Well, there is no full-on parody of the type of races they have in the FAST movies, but there’s a competition very reminiscent of Race Wars and – maybe the highlight of the movie – a version of that shot the early ones do where the camera goes inside the car and flies around a CG engine as it kicks in. But this isn’t a muscle car, it’s Herbie the Love Bug, and the engine is animated all bendy like a cartoon.

Oh and by the way, the second unit director/stunt coordinator is the legendary Spiro Razatos, who later did FASTs FIVE, 6, SEVEN, FATE, 9 and X (as well as MANIAC COP 1, 2 and 3). And come to think of it it’s with FAST FIVE that the FASTs catch up to the cartoon physics he was doing with Herbie. Another connection is that, according to this very detailed online source, this car that Maggie sits in in the junkyard…

…is Dom’s actual Charger Stunt Car 2 from the first film! The one that got smashed at the end. At this point they had only made THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS and 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS (which does not have Dom or his car in it) so there was no reason to believe it would be needed again.

Similar to the kid in the recent KARATE KID LEGENDS and his mom not letting him fight, Maggie is forbidden from racing ever since she crashed her car into a tree and was hospitalized. She accepted her fate, went off and got a college degree and an internship at ESPN, but now she’s in this magic car, it non-consensually takes her on a rip-roaring joyride, and suddenly she’s getting the itch again. Also Herbie makes her almost run over local mechanic Kevin (Justin Long, JEEPERS CREEPERS), rekindling old crushes they seem to have had on each other as he volunteers to help her fix up Herbie and then gets her back into racing.

The real catalyst is that famous NASCAR asshole Trip Murphy (Matt Dillon, WILD THINGS) shows up at the race to promote his new video game, and she ends up defeating him in a street race, becoming a national story and turning her into a NASCAR contender, though she has to hide it from her dad by pretending to be a mysterious man named Maxx and wearing a helmet with a tinted visor that I guess only we can see through, because we believe in her enough or whatever. Later her friend Charisma (Kid Rock’s sister Jill Ritchie, BEST OF THE BEST 4: WITHOUT WARNING) calls that “pulling a Racer X.”

Breckin Meyer (following GARFIELD and BLAST) plays Maggie’s brother Ray Jr., who’s allowed to drive on the Bass Pro Shop team even though everybody knows he’s not as good as her. Jimmi Simpson (LOSER) plays a dipshit flunky of Trip’s who, in his biggest scene, tries to destroy Herbie by entering him in a demolition derby. Somehow I noticed Scoot McNairy in the crew too, I was impressed with myself for being right because they barely show his face. TV ex-wife of Larry David/real life wife of a fascist roadkill-devouring disease-monger Cheryl Hines plays I guess the sponsor of the team who also sometimes is hanging around like a mother figure but mainly is important because she owns a car that Herbie is both mechanically and romantically compatible with.

There are a couple story points that confused me a little. One, it takes Maggie a while to realize that Herbie is more than a car, but I didn’t notice why or when she went from thinking there was something magical about him to actually speaking to him as a fellow sentient being. Two, the emotional center of the story is about Maggie trying to prove herself as a driver despite her dad’s over-protectiveness and the sport’s sexism, but it’s unclear how much control she has over Herbie, if any, so does she even know if she’s still a good driver?

I guess there’s an implication that there’s some telepathic connection that maybe counts as her driving? She’s introduced showing up late to graduation on a skateboard, and later when Herbie slides across a guardrail she says she was wishing she was on her skateboard so she could grind it.

The look of the film is interesting because often when it cuts to car/stunt footage it starts looking more like the old Herbie movies. It seemed to me the second unit was using a different film stock. If so, I wonder whether it was intended to be noticeable or not. For the record the director of photography is Greg Gardiner (SUTURE) and the second unit d.p./camera operator is Jacques Haitkin, who was the cinematographer of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 1 and 2, THE HIDDEN, CHERRY 2000 and more).

They seem to have shot a whole lot of footage at a real NASCAR track, and there’s a totally deadpan THE RIGHT STUFF type slo-mo shot where Mark Mothersbaugh’s score gets all majestic as the crew rolls Herbie in and Maggie walks in behind them looking like a badass.

I also like the use of split screen, wipes and letterboxing with Herbie’s red white and blue racing stripe.

Those type of retro graphics are especially used in the fun opening credits sequence, a montage of previous Herbie movies and fake newspaper articles about his sports achievements and celebrity lifestyle. My favorite is the one about 53 partying at Club 54. There’s also one about him hanging out with KITT, which begs the questions does this take place in a world where Knight Industries Two Thousand is real, or is he hanging out with the car from the fictional show Knight Rider, and if so is that car alive or is he just kind of a weird creep hanging out with an inanimate object? I do not know the answers.

I suspect this opening was a late addition, because it doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie. I had my fingers crossed for a scene where Maggie goes to the library and finds the articles from that montage on microfiche. At no point during the movie does anyone remember that Herbie used to be famous, and most people don’t even notice he’s anything but a normal car.

Although it’s G-rated there is a bunch of innuendo, including a visual gag where it looks like the young couple are going at it inside the car, and of course a boi-oi-oing sound effect to confirm that Herbie’s radio antenna is his boner. General audiences must’ve been so scandalized. I have to admit that the joke of Herbie being turned on by seeing a bright yellow modern VW Bug parked nearby made me laugh, and seemed funnier the more I considered the likelihood that no other cars are alive and he still wants to hump them.

There are a weird number of similarities to BUMBLEBEE – similarly aged heroine fixing up a junker VW, finding it’s secretly magic, soundtrack of ‘80s hits plus one song sung by the lead actress, sweet non-threatening crush. In other ways they’re very different though and BUMBLEBEE is (to me) much more effective. But it also has the advantage of him turning into a robot.

I would not consider HERBIE: FULLY LOADED to be a very good movie. Though there are some laughs, much of the humor barely counts as jokes – it’s like oh shit Herbie sprayed oil on a guy! or geez, Matt Dillon is so mad! The story is formulaic in an acceptable way, but not executed well enough to actually be moving. Still, I don’t know, I didn’t mind the movie, I sorta got into it because it looks pretty good and, though Dillon is clearly acting in a comedy, Lohan, Keaton and Long all approach their characters with complete sincerity. There’s a certain low key charm to taking something they know is dated and treating it with a straight face. Any attempt to x-treme it up is part of the joke. This is definitely way better than some of the kids movies I did in my last summer retrospective (especially 3 NINJAS KICK BACK).

The story is credited to the writing team of Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant (THE PACIFIER) and Mark Perez (THE COUNTRY BEARS), screenplay by Lennon/Garant and the team of Alfred Gough & Miles Millar (LETHAL WEAPON 4, SPIDER-MAN 2).

I actually started this thinking it was gonna be directed by Peyton Reed (BRING IT ON), but that was the 1997 made-for-the-Disney-Channel sequel starring Bruce Campbell. The director of this one is Angela Robinson, who previously directed D.E.B.S, which Ritchie, Simpson and McNairy were all in. I’ve never seen it but it has enough of a cult that it’s playing at my neighborhood theater this month. For whatever it’s worth, Robinson might be the first Black lesbian director of a Disney movie? Not sure. But it’s cool that we’ve already had three movies directed by women in this summer (THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS, LORDS OF DOGTOWN and this.) Robinson has only directed one feature film since this – PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (2017) – but she’s written and directed for TV, including episodes of The L Word, Hung, True Blood, and the upcoming season of Wednesday. Come to think of it, Gough & Millar created Wednesday. They must’ve liked working with her.

tie-ins: 

I learned from checking ebay that there were many HERBIE: FULLY LOADED-branded die cast cars, including some not even related to the movie (such as a VW bus). There were also valentines (with temporary tattoo and poster), a junior novelization, an “Official Movie Scrapbook,” and a video game.