Veronica Mars was a high school detective, helping her
private investigator father with his caseload and taking on all kinds of
unofficial work from peers and acquaintances who found themselves in
unfortunate circumstances. Inspired by the unsolved murder of her best friend
and her father’s line of work, she threw herself into her hobby, getting into
sleuthing scrapes and uncovering the seedy underbelly of her economically
stratified hometown full of privileged conspiratorial snobs and rough criminal
elements alike. Such was the weekly life of this teenager, a breakout role for
Kristen Bell, during the 2004 to 2007 three-season run of Veronica Mars, before the TV series was cancelled after having been
tinkered with and compromised by a network eager to make it a bigger hit than
it ever would be. Ever since, fans have wanted more of her story, or at least a
proper finale, and so has Rob Thomas, the show’s creator and showrunner. Years
of studio negotiations and a much-hyped Kickstarter campaign later and here we
are with a Veronica Mars movie, a big
screen continuation of her adventures.
I didn’t watch the series when it aired, but having gorged
on it to catch up in time to see the film, I bet anyone who has long loved this
show will be most pleased. It picks up a decade after Veronica’s high school
graduation. She’s long since moved from her home in Neptune, California. Still
dating her Season 3 boyfriend Piz (Chris Lowell), she has graduated law school
and is poised to take a job at a New York City law firm. So far she’s been able
to resist the call of Neptune and all the entanglements and pain it represents
to her. She won’t even be attending her upcoming high school reunion. But, as
was often the case in the series, there has been a high-profile murder in her
hometown. Troubled rich kid, and Veronica’s old on-again-off-again boyfriend,
Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) is the only suspect. She feels compelled to help,
dusting off her old detective skills after having so thoroughly left them
behind. Her investigation leads her straight into the reunion, falling back in
with old friends (Percy Daggs III, Tina Majorino, Francis Capra) and old
antagonists (Ryan Hansen, Krysten Ritter). Soon, the simple murder
investigation doesn’t seem so simple.
It’s an entire season of Veronica
Mars packed into one 107-minute movie. The screenplay by Rob Thomas and
Diane Ruggiero (a writer on the series) has all of the intrigue and
relationship melodrama of the show’s overarching big mysteries without the
sometimes hit-and-miss nature of the case-of-the-weeks dictated by the demands
of the standard 22-episode broadcast order. I found the show often stretched the
season-long mysteries too thin, especially by each season’s midpoint, so the
necessary compression of the theatrical format solves my biggest problem with
the show. It allows for a story that’s tightly structured, full of
complications and unexpected twists, and the dark humor and eclectic cultural
references fans of the show would expect. It also plays fair with the characters
as they’ve been established, providing fans an opportunity to live out the
reunion with Veronica, to stay with her father (a warm Enrico Colantoni) once more, and to see all the old Neptune High classmates yet again. It’s nice to see how easily the
characters fall back into their old rhythms.
There’s a sense of welcome familiarity here. Even the murder
and conspiracies seem like old times. It feels exactly like Veronica Mars, which also makes the
whole thing, as directed by Thomas, feel at times like a comfortable TV movie. But, hey, it’s an
especially engaging one. It’s an amiable reunion that pulls back the ensemble for another
big mystery. The sense of fun is infectious as the movie piles high with
callbacks, needling in-jokes, and cameos that add up to an enjoyable story that
can stand on its own. Where the movie works best, maybe even for those who know
little to nothing about the characters and their pasts, is the tight focus on
Veronica with a clear emotional through line. Bell is hugely charming being as much
of a clever smart aleck and whip smart investigator as she ever was. But now
there’s real reluctance to how comfortable it is falling into old patterns.
There is a palpable sense that her teen sleuthing days were a coping mechanism
and the continual moral shambles of her hometown is a kind of inescapable
tragedy that’s gotten under her skin.
It makes for a fine detective movie, a digital age grown-up Nancy-Drew-by-way-of-The-O.C. neo-noir, as this ex-P.I. returns
to a life she thought she left firmly in the past to find a town that’s only
further crumbling under corruption and opportunistic classism. She’s about to
fully escape, but finds she craves the rush of cracking a case. She needs to
scratch the itch and right some wrongs. Her sense of loyalty to her father, her
old friends, and her old life only enables this drive, and makes for an interesting
addiction portrait. Maybe it’s also a commentary on the expectations of
standard TV plotting. We need everything to be what it was, always ready to
perpetuate the old conflicts anew. We need yet another case to be solved. We
need the characters ready to play their parts. We need our hero able to step in
and do what she does best over and over again.
One of the best things about the series was the way it had
consequences linger, the results of a case big or small lasting in the form of
grudges, expectations, compromises, criminal records, and plain old emotional
traumas. No one emerged clean. The messy business of detective work and soapy
mid-aught’s teen drama left marks. The movie is smart to continue along those
lines, with stains of the past seeping into seemingly unrelated present day
situations, driving old resentments and new crimes. It makes for fun thematic
play and a great central hook for a reunion story. The characters are likable company and the mystery is resolved in a way that is most satisfying.
But in the end, no one’s addiction will be cured. You just know Veronica will need to be out there solving mysteries.
And I know there will be an audience anxious to see her do so.
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