Despite entertainment pundits talking endlessly about how we’re living in a Golden Age of television and claiming that television has overtaken cinema as the best creative medium for filmmakers to work in, whenever a TV show jumps to the big screen with a movie adaptation, it’s still always a great reminder of the different sets of expectations we put on an episode of a TV show and a feature-length film. Has any TV-show-turned-movie ever really successfully expanded out the scope of its storytelling, blew up its aesthetic, and broadened out its world enough for it to feel like a proper movie and not just a slightly longer version of something that belongs on the small screen? If something has, it’s not coming to my mind right now, and the latest fan favorite series to spawn a movie, Veronica Mars, doesn’t break that streak either.
That’s not to say that Veronica Mars is an unpleasant experience, however. If there were three main things creator Rob Thomas’ cancelled-too-soon TV show about a teenage detective had going for it, they were the chemistry of its cast, the wit and pop of its dialogue, and the storytelling potential inherent in its fictional and economically divided setting of Neptune, California—and all of those things are still present here. Kristen Bell is still great as the title character, she still has great chemistry with all of the actors playing her friends and family (especially Enrico Colantoni, who plays her father), and the haves and have-nots of Neptune still seem to find themselves violently, endlessly at odds with one another. Fans of the show should have no problem finding things in here to like.
They won’t be able to jump right in and have it immediately feel like old times though, because the first act of the film has to do a lot of work to get people who haven’t seen the show up to speed, and even to update fans on the new statuses of all their former friends who they haven’t thought of lately at all. When making a movie that’s a follow-up to three seasons of a television show, there are two directions one can take. You can pare down the cast, put the focus squarely on the central relationships, and tell a self-contained story that doesn’t ignore what came before it, but doesn’t get caught up in it either, or you can try to find a way to fit every theme, every character, and every ongoing plot thread your show established into one movie, and hope that everything somehow finds room to breathe.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Thomas has taken the approach of cramming everything in, likely as an attempt to service the hardcore fans who partly funded this film before it ever even went in front of cameras. Veronica Mars finds room to fit in even the most ancillary of characters you remember from the show, it’s bursting with in-jokes referencing events that happened over the course of the show’s runtime, and it’s even got got some Meta-references to stuff that happened behind-the-scenes, that only the true obsessives would understand the significance of. This approach doesn’t just mean that newbies will find themselves lost and overwhelmed by all of the info dumps, it also means that even those of us going in predisposed to love Veronica Mars can start to feel like we’re wading through mud while trying to get to the juicy bits of the new mystery Veronica is tackling. There are only so many character reintroductions and catchup montages one can take, after all.
Veronica Mars suffers a bit from looking like a TV show too. That’s not to say that the original Veronica Mars series ever looked bad, or that this movie does either—Thomas has an eye for photography and he’s created a unique neo-noir aesthetic for the sun-soaked but nonetheless shady town of Neptune—it’s just that this movie was clearly made on a minuscule budget, and the limitations he works within due to that budget feel an awful lot like the limitations showrunners face when trying not to run out of money by the end of the 22-episode run of a typical network show. The action here is very small scale, the locations extremely limited, and ultimately what it ends up feeling like you’re watching is—once again—just a slightly longer episode of a TV show. That’s not a terrible thing, because Veronica Mars was always a good TV show, but when audiences are paying the premium of a movie ticket they tend to expect something larger scale, or at least something that digs a bit deeper when it comes to its depth of emotion, and aims a bit higher when it comes to the level of its artistry. This feature film version of Veronica Mars matches what came before it, but it never manages to become something else.
That said, it still tells an effective mystery story that not only has personal stakes for Veronica, but also has lasting impact on the world of Neptune, California, it introduces a few new characters into the mix who work well alongside those we’re already familiar with (especially Jerry O’Connell as the corrupt new Sheriff and Martin Starr as an ex-classmate of Veronica’s), it’s full of laughs, and—perhaps best of all—it leaves Veronica in a place where, should this venture prove successful enough to spawn a sequel, we’ll likely be able to jump directly into the heart of a new story without having to do so much work getting all of the pieces back in place. And, if a sequel does happen, hopefully that new story will also be one that doesn’t focus so heavily on the drama-laden, on-again-off-again relationship between Veronica and her hot-headed and star-crossed love, Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), like this one did. All of the blood had already been drained from that stone by the time the show was moving into its third season, don’t you think?
