Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) – DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Lindsay Lohan, Justin Long, Breckin Meyer, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Angela Robinson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s this girl, Maggie Payton (Lindsay Lohan), who wants to be a NASCAR driver. That much I got. Her father (Michael Keaton) is, of course, an overprotective wuss who wants to shield Maggie from masculine pursuits. I’m right with you up to there. The only way to prove she can handle the danger is…to drive a self-propelled VW Bug that does all the work for her? Such is the logical conundrum of Herbie: Fully Loaded, which comes on like a female-empowerment comedy-melodrama while depriving its heroine of autonomy over the career she so desperately craves. As the damned Beetle completely destroys any attempt to make its pilot a prime mover, there’s really nothing at stake for anyone behind the wheel–and while this is fine if you’re a schlep like Dean Jones, it doesn’t do much if you’re trying to sneak in feminist subtext.

Director Angela Robinson is no stranger to such subtext. After all, she previously helmed D.E.B.S., a lesbian-schoolgirl espionage comedy that’s sweet and funny and possessed of an irresistible (if one-joke) concept. But Robinson’s rendezvous with the Disney machine has forced her into a corner–that is, to bend her sensibility around an existing franchise. And so she tries to shoehorn her mildly feminist agenda into a concept that can’t really sustain it: unless Herbie had received a sex change, the girl driving him was always going to be second banana. Herbie proves quite the scene hogger besides, demanding total adoration from the girl who rescued him from the junkyard when it ought to be he unleashing her mojo.

This has consequences for Herbie as much as for Lohan. The tug of war between antithetical concepts comes up with something neither fish nor fowl–a weird, unsatisfying mixture even if you side with one over the other. To be sure, there’s an obnoxious big-shot driver, Trip Murphy (Matt Dillon), constantly humiliated by what’s-her-name and the Bug, and he introduces a flashy racer to lure our heroine away from the beacon of truth that is a vintage Volkswagen named Herbie. But our sympathies are divided: do we feel for Maggie, whose mission is meaningless? Or do we invest in Herbie, hopelessly upstaged by rising young Lohan and largely obscured beneath her plot machinations? The result is that both entities cancel each other out, taking the movie down with them.

Nothing in the film is designed to handle this kind of scrutiny, and yet its discordant elements demand nothing less. The tween kids going for Lohan are going to be puzzled; the little kids looking for a cute car will be bewildered; and everyone else is going to wonder what the point was. The point, as it turns out, was to force a Disney trademark back onto the market with little consideration for the audience, the director’s strong points, or anything cinematic. As Herbie: Fully Loaded is about nothing but the contracts, I can’t imagine anyone in or out of its target demographic getting anything other than annoyed. You’d have to be “fully loaded” (on Wild Turkey and ‘shrooms) to wrap your head around its conceptual planning. And if you’re that far gone, you’re probably too addled to operate the remote.

THE DVD
Herbie: Fully Loaded arrives on DVD from Disney in a fairly decent package. The 1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced image is a little oversaturated–primary colours are so artificially bright that I can’t imagine encountering them in a theatrical presentation. Still, there’s no loss of definition and no bleed-through. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is similarly OK, offering a solid, workmanlike distribution of the various sound elements in lieu of fireworks. Extras break down as follows:

Commentary with director Angela Robinson
The erstwhile D.E.B.S. director waxes informative on the production and is surprisingly all business in detailing her adventures. She’s candid about the test-screening rejigging that forced them to introduce Herbie earlier (suggesting she wasn’t that interested in the franchise per se), among other things. She’s also too credulous of the material, but then you knew that.

Deleted Scenes
Seven superfluous beauties here with optional commentary from Robinson. The most significant omission is a plot thread in which Maggie’s inept racer brother (Breckin Meyer) reveals he’d rather be a musician.

Alternate Title Opening (3 mins.)
This crudely-animated opener never made it past the planning stages after it was discovered that test audiences wanted more background on Herbie himself. It’s too bad, because this is quite witty compared with the rest of the film. Also offered with Robinson commentary on the whys and wherefores of how the sequence was jettisoned.

“A Day at the Races” (13 mins.)
NASCAR driver Deborah Renshaw hosts this featurette on racing, women who race, racing in the movie, etc. It’s a rather deft piece of pro-Herbie propaganda, skillfully interweaving interrogations of the cast into the milieu with driving 101 basics so as to transend its status as advertising for the film. Although we can see through the ruse, it gets an “A” for effort.

“Breaking the Rules: Stunts from Herbie: Fully Loaded“ (9 mins.)
A reasonably interesting delve into the stunts used to anthropomorphize a ’63 Beetle. Abbreviated and peppered with idiotic interjections from the cast though it is, it’s one of those rare featurettes that’s interesting in spite of itself.

“Bringing Herbie to Life” (12 mins.)
This is the other one. Fewer cast inanities festoon an exploration of the practical/CGI debate, with Robinson insisting on a mechanical Herbie as much as possible–and the processes by which various Herbies were made for various purposes are worth noting.

“First” Music Video (3 mins.)
In stark contrast to the squeaky-clean (or at least wink-nudge) approach of the movie is this vaguely trampy video wherein Lohan dons tight outfits to sing of wanting to come first in her man’s life. Given how diametrically opposed Lohan’s music persona is from anything in Herbie: Fully Loaded, it’s no wonder they had trouble marketing this relatively tame movie.

Bloopers (5 mins.)
Self-explanatory. For those about to flub, we salute you.

Sneak peeks at Sky High, Lady and the Tramp, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Kronk’s New Groove and “Movie Surfer” segments on Antarctica: The Journey Home and Walt Disney’s World’s Xtreme Stunt Show round out the platter.

102 minutes; G; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1; English, English SDH, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Disney