'Veronica Mars: The Movie': Just Okay

By Julia Bianco on March 21, 2014

WARNING: Spoilers ahead!

Photo by SMIRK.es on Flickr.com

I don’t know how I feel about Veronica Mars: The Movie. I’m as big of a Veronica Mars fan as the next girl— the noire-y story of Vernoica Mars, a teenaged PI played by Kristen Bell, had me hooked from episode one (or, to be honest, episode four). The show pulled together solid mysteries, a witty protagonist, and the ultimate will-they- won’t-they relationship between Veronica and hot-tempered bad boy Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring). But something about the movie just didn’t click with me.

The movie was completely designed for the fans. Its Kickstarter background and the enthusiasm of the series stars and directors meant that it truly was a labor of love, something that really did show through in the finished product. Series creator Rob Thomas pulled out all the stops, bringing back as many familiar faces and callbacks to the original series as possible. Some of these I really appreciated— my heart leapt when I saw Deputy Leo (Max Greenfield) again, and the image of Logan carrying Veronica into her house after Keith’s (Enrico Colantoni) car accident (just like he did in the season two finale) was perfect symmetry. However, some of the other callbacks felt a bit excessive, and took away screen time from the characters who I really wanted to see.

One of my main issues with the movie is that it spent too much time with auxiliary characters, which neglected some of the more important ones— Mac (Tina Majorino), Wallace (Percy Daggs III), Piz (Chris Lowell), Dick (Ryan Hansen), and even Logan, whose chance to deliver witty one liners and smoldering looks was seriously diminished in the film (although I really appreciated his inspirational voicemail message that played during the credits).

The fact that Francis Capra’s Weevil was given his own devoted storyline was completely unnecessary. Despite being one the show’s best characters during the first season, he quickly lost my interest as the writers began to struggle to find storylines for him during the second, and especially third, seasons. I haven’t cared much about Weevil for a while, and giving him so much time in the movie just to have him leave his wife and daughter to return to gang life once again was unnecessary, and seemed to be a step backwards for the character that we came to know and love throughout the series.

Speaking of characters taking steps backwards, did anyone else feel like Veronica was a little bitchy in the movie? Of course, she was sassy during the series, especially to people she didn’t like. Her quick wit and penchant for one-liners were some of her best qualities, but in the film it seems she stepped over a line between being feisty to being straight up mean, especially in the way she treated Piz. Completely disregarding her relationship with him in favor of the case was typical Veronica, but having her act so callously about their feelings for each other was disrespectful to both of their characters. Of course, we all knew going into it that Veronica was going to end up with Logan and not Piz, but it could have been handled in a way that would have given more thought to both of their characters.

Photo by Javier Fernandez on Flickr.com

Most of this had to do with the time constraints of a movie. The writers had a lot of storylines to wrap up in a short amount of time. The series specialized in slowly developed relationships and long drawn out cases, so seeing so much content condensed into just under two hours felt strange. Veronica and Logan seemed to get together too quickly, the story with the corrupt sheriff’s department wasn’t given anywhere near as much attention as it deserved, and the ten year reunion scene was cut incredibly short. All of the important series marks were there, but they were smashed together in a way that felt too quick and only scratched the surface of the issues presented.

I know this all sounds like I had a very negative opinion of the film, but overall, I think it was a success. It did a great job of bringing back familiar faces and familiar places, and giving us some more closure to the storylines that were left unfinished in the season three finale. Even though it did give some side characters too much attention, it did a wonderful job dealing with others, bringing back seedy private detective Vinnie VanLowe (Ken Marino) in an absolutely perfect way (“Let’s Go Back to My Van: The Vinnie Van Lowe Story” sounds like it would be really awesome), and seeing Detective Sacks (Brandon Hillock) get such a deserving, although very sad, send-off was a great ending for a relatively unknown character. Most of the other callbacks to the original series were very well done, and the movie presented a pretty solid mystery story (although the recasting of Leighton Meester’s Carrie Bishop bothered me a bit).