Written by Katherine Murray
The Veronica Mars movie delivers on many of the promises made to fans of the TV series, but less so on the promises of the hard-boiled detective story at its core.
Warning: This review contains partial spoilers for both the movie and the TV show.
When Veronica Mars premiered in 2004, the conceit of the series was simple – it was a classic, hard-boiled detective story, moved to a high school setting, where the role of the cynical, world-weary gumshoe was played by a cute teenage girl. What made the series stand out is that, rather than treating the premise as a joke, the writers took it completely seriously and used the conventions of the genre to build a topical, neo-noir world in which the corruption of the justice system comes through in its treatment of women and people of colour, and class struggle comes through in bullying that begins in the schoolyard.
Veronica is introduced to us as a rape survivor whose claims were never investigated by the police, which goes a long way toward explaining her prickly demeanour and suspicion toward the authorities. Her father, Keith Mars, is a P.I. who lost his position as Sheriff after accusing the town’s most powerful man of a crime. Together, they spend most of the first season investigating the murder of Veronica’s best friend, Lily Kane – a case that reveals the ways that the wealthy have tried to conceal the truth. When Lily’s killer is eventually caught and sent to trial, he’s found Not Guilty, in part because the jury is convinced not to believe Veronica’s testimony for reasons of suspected promiscuity. It’s clear that the only kind of justice in Chinatown Neptune is the justice you make for yourself, and the show successfully mixes the tropes of the hard-boiled detective with depictions of very real social and political injustice to create a story that resonates.
In the second season, Veronica investigates a bus crash and uncovers an even deeper spread of corruption, culminating in the discovery that the mayor is a pedophile, and Veronica’s rapist is one of the boys he molested. Families that appear to be normal and wholesome are revealed as harbouring child abuse, and Veronica loses the person she loves and the scholarship that would have let her go to Stanford as the price for trying to do the right thing.
The third season drops the plot a little, but ends on a suitably downtrodden, hard-boiled note – Keith, who regained his position as Sheriff, is about to be kicked out of office again, and Veronica returns to her status as a social pariah after some rich boys make and distribute a sex tape of her. Despite trying, for three years, to help Neptune’s underclass find justice, the Mars family is back where it started, and the powerful forces against them are still gaining strength.
The movie checks in with Veronica nine years later and, while it does fans (who funded it through Kickstarter) a solid by giving them a chance to reconnect with the characters and tying up loose ends, Veronica Mars the movie is considerably less interested in all of this grimdark sociology stuff.
It turns out that Veronica walked away from the detective business after the series ended and started a new, normal life, attending law school, and moving in with her bland third season boyfriend, Piz. When she gets a call from her more exciting ex, Logan Echolls, she does what we want her to do – she throws Piz and her burgeoning career as a lawyer away and returns to the seedy underworld of Neptune to continue the doomed fight for justice as a P.I. The voiceover frames this as an addiction – to Logan (who has lost all of the personality traits that made him addictive and dangerous in the TV show) and to the adrenaline rush of living in the gray zone between light and dark. There’s a subtext, though, in which this is also a moral decision – Veronica was about to “escape” from Neptune at the price of working for the very, very rich, who’re holding everyone down; when she sees the corruption in Neptune’s police force, she realizes that this is where the battle’s being fought and, therefore, where she needs to stay.
The A-plot of the story concerns Veronica trying to solve a murder for Logan, which reconnects her both with her passion for him and her passion for solving crimes. The B-plot, though, is where the hard-boiled detective story lives, and it’s living on life support – barely hanging in there from beginning to end.
In the B-plot, the police force of Neptune has become even more blatantly (and ham-fistedly) corrupt than before. They’re conducting stop and frisk searches, planting evidence, and making wrongful arrests. One of the best and most topical scenes in the film occurs when Keith and Veronica see the police Taser a teenage boy and Keith gets out of his car to make sure they know that he’s filming it all on his phone. This is how the little people fight back in 2014, and it’s a moment that resonates both with contemporary culture and with the hard-boiled aesthetic of the series.
Veronica’s sometime-friend, Weevil, is later shot and booked for a crime on false evidence, after he stops to help someone in trouble. In the TV series, Weevil was Veronica’s primary criminal contact – a gang leader with a conscience who carried out a violent form of justice for the underclass. He left the gang when they lost the mission, but ended up in jail. When the movie checks in with him, we learn that, like Veronica, he’s been a law-abiding citizen for years, with a job, and a family – carefully building a life for himself that distances him from his origins. After the events of the film, the last we see of Weevil is that he’s gone back to the gang. Like Veronica, he puts on his old costume and gives up the idea of walking away.
That story about how Neptune is losing the war against corruption, and how its heroes are drawn back to the darkness to fight it? That story that engages with the genre concerns of the series and invigorates them by making them relevant and part of a morally complex world? That should have been the A-story.
What we get instead, for most of the film, is a throwback to Veronica’s high school days (framed by her ten-year reunion). The mystery concerns her wealthier classmates (some of whom we know and some of whom we don’t) and the discovery of a crime that may have been committed in their youth. It’s totally disconnected from the police corruption story and mostly serves as an excuse to get the band back together, leading to scenes like Veronica punching out one of the high school mean girls, and plot points concerning invitations to parties and after-parties, or who’s dating whom. In terms of fan service, this makes sense – in superficial ways, it gives us more of the show we loved: more high school; more of our favourite characters; more cute, funny moments between them. In terms of letting us visit with old friends, Veronica Mars delivers in spades.
In terms of giving our old friends something of interest to say, the movie delivers less. While the bar was admittedly set pretty high by the series, the movie doesn’t reach the same heights in terms of using the genre to say something meaningful about the world we live in. Veronica is still a great character, but the movie loses touch with her hard-boiled roots and gets lost in nostalgia rather than digging for the gritty, hard-to-stomach truth.
In the end, there’s plenty of laughter, and tense final scenes with the killer – and the movie is crammed full of in-jokes, and nods to the fans – but something’s still missing. The spark that made it relevant is gone, and now it’s just a trip down memory lane with someone who happens to be a detective.
Read Also at Bitch Flicks: A Long Time Ago, We Used to Be Friends: The Veronica Mars Movie
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
Wow — love this, and I totally agree with everything!