REVIEWED - HERBIE: FULLY LOADED: This harmless but dull Love Bug may appeal to the extremely young, judges Donald Clarke

Herbie, the possessed white Volkswagen that kept Disney afloat through the counterculture years, is, according to this latest outing, the same age as me. I trust I have weathered the decades better. He seems so much meaner and less cultured than he used to be. His aerial springs lustily to attention when he sees a lady Beetle. His headlamps roll drunkenly. He apes skateboard moves while racing. Most depressingly, Herbie has developed an enthusiasm for NASCAR racing, a sport so moronically boring it causes drowsiness even in Formula 1 fans.

To be fair, Fully Loaded is a harmless enough entertainment. Lindsay Lohan, caught before she embarked on her recent hunger strike, plays the youngest member of a family of racing drivers. Her father (Michael Keaton), still traumatised by the death of his wife in an accident, forbids the ginger tyke from competitive driving. Then she happens upon the sentient German compact in a junkyard and, instead of summoning an automotive exorcist, embarks on a career in the sport of the permanently anesthetised.

No film featuring a helicopter shot of Lohan speeding along the Pacific Coast Highway to the strains of Born to Be Wild is going to be a complete waste of time. But Disney may have lost sight of the demographics here.

Back in the early 1970s, when we still played with hoops and jacks, this frisky motorcar was the most exciting thing we had experienced since the end of rationing. Now it will probably delight only infants, who, sad to relate, are likely to regard this version of Lindsay as a decrepit old duffer. Donald Clarke