Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Michael Keaton, Cheryl Hines, Breckin Meyer

5 out of 10 stars

For those of you with daggers out for Lindsay Lohan, trying to trip up the tabloid-friendly teen as she bops from movie to movie in between bouts of partying, I have disappointing news for you: Herbie: Fully Loaded is actually not all that bad. Granted, it's an innocuous kids' movie through and through - an exact 21st century replica of the live-action movies that were once Disney's bread and butter in the '60s and '70s - but it's far from terrible. This Herbie, while never truly picking up speed, coasts along smoothly enough under the direction of Angela Robinson and a straightforward follow-your-dream story that, for some reason, needed four screenwriters to crank it out. And Lohan, while certainly not as good as she was in Freaky Friday or Mean Girls, is still in possession of that certain star quality, for even when nothing's happening at all, she still draws the camera and the audience toward her. If the pull isn't as strong as before, well, imagine how well you would do if you were headlining a movie in which your most charismatic co-star was a car.

Eschewing fancy-schmancy digital effects for back-to-basics racing sequences and trafficking in the kind of juvenile humor where oil squirting in someone's face is the height of sophistication, Herbie is pleasingly retro - even some of the boing-boing sound effects are enough to bring back memories of original Herbie: The Love Bug star Dean Jones. The plot is pretty rote, with a couple modern updates added on here and there; in fact, substitute cars for horses, and you wouldn't have something too terribly different from National Velvet. Red-headed spitfire Maggie Peyton (Lohan) has just graduated from college, and at the behest of her overprotective dad (Michael Keaton) is moving to NYC and taking a job at ESPN instead of joining the family stock-car race biz in California. A jaunt to a junkyard for an extremely used car as a graduation present unearths Herbie, who's gone to the dogs since his glory days in the 60s. But he sees in Maggie's freewheeling skateboarding style a kindred spirit, and soon enough the two hit the road and butt heads with NASCAR king Trip Murphy (Matt Dillon), who can't believe he can be bested by a '63 Beetle. And yes, there is a Big Race around the corner which will pit the curvaceous David against the slick-haired Goliath…

The movie does tend to take a significant dip whenever Dillon shows up, and he has quite a bit of screen time, more than you'd expect. He's a perfectly acceptable kids-movie villain, but is neither really funny enough nor menacing enough to provoke any kind of response. And when he and Lohan spar, it appears to be almost a meeting of the minds, to his detriment, as he comes off as the slightly less smart of the two, not just in character but in acting style as well. Then again, human-on-human interaction is not Herbie: Fully Loaded's strong suit, as any scene involving two people and one emotion is rather flat, from Lohan and Keaton's father-daughter arguing to the heroine's G-rated romantic subplot with a mechanic (Justin Long, who's tiny but cute in both appearance and performance). All the plot's just there to hang some car scenes off of, with TV actors like Breckin Meyer and Cheryl Hines tacked on for window dressing, alongside some product placements and NASCAR cameos.

Fortunately, a good amount of the movie involves just Lohan, Herbie, and some asphalt, and the driving and racing scenes (one would hesitate to actually define them as "action") are appealingly low-tech and rather enjoyable in their own "oh-my-god-the-car's-driving-itself!" kind of way. Herbie himself is gussied up with only minimal effects (smiling/frowning fender, blinking headlights, sun visors for eyebrows) and, well, proves to be kind of fun, though the flirting scenes with the updated Beetle babe are a bit too cutesy. And Lohan, though she barely possess the spark that she's shown previously, doesn't do anything to embarrass herself, and even the much-ballyhooed digital remastering of her cleavage (which appears to extend only to raised necklines, not reduction of any kind) does little to upstage her charm, which, granted, is only on low wattage here - though man, at some point that girl's legs have grown something fierce! Lohan's mere presence is enough to keep Herbie running for 90 minutes -- more than you could reasonably expect for a movie that's so aggressively middle-of-the-road.