Herbie Fully Loaded (2005)

The 2005 model of the Herbie franchise arrives with a woman at the wheel and a woman in the director's chair, which is more than the 1968 original could manage. Maggie Peyton, played by Lindsay Lohan, inherits a sentient Volkswagen and drives it into NASCAR, a sport her father has forbidden her to enter. The arc is standard issue underdog sports material: doubt, defiance, a pit stop, a win. Angela Robinson directs with efficiency, and the empowerment on offer is genuine but familiar, the kind of girl-power narrative studios had been selling for a decade. The film earns a modest nod for putting a young woman in a boys' garage. It does not arrive with a manifesto.

The garage, however, is very white, and the film has no interest in remarking on that. Race goes unmentioned. So does the environment, which is convenient for a movie that worships combustion engines and treats a Nextel Cup race as the summit of human striving. The production is dense with product placement, from ESPN to General Motors, and contains no whisper of a complaint about any of it. There is no body politics here, no neurodivergent character, no revision of the historical record, no sermon. The film offers instead a Volkswagen that falls for a yellow New Beetle, a villain who crashes into Jeff Gordon, and a running gag about an oil-soaked t-shirt.

This is a legacy sequel, the sixth trip to the well, and it knows its audience: children, plus the parents who will be checking their iPods, as Roger Ebert predicted. Audiences graded it an A. Critics gave it forty percent. Both verdicts are defensible. The film's cultural footprint amounts to a car that honks on cue and a soundtrack of cover songs, and its social ambition extends exactly as far as letting a young woman win a race. That is a pleasant thing. It is not a movement. We file it accordingly, with the mild affection owed to harmless machinery.