Detective – Bitch Flicks

‘Lady Detective’: ‘Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries’ Explores Feminism in the 1920s

Phryne acts just as independent and liberated outside of the bedroom. She knows how to fly a plane, she delights in driving her own car, a Hispano-Suiza, and totes around a golden revolver with a pearl-encrusted handle. Oh, she also has impeccable taste in clothes.

This is a guest post by Lauren Byrd.

The Australian TV show, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (the first two seasons are available on Netflix), is set in the roaring 20s, famous for its jazz, gin, shorter hemlines, bobbed hair, and Art Deco design. The protagonist, Phryne Fisher (pronounced Fry-nee), is an heiress to a small fortune, but she also possesses a sense of adventure and a knack for solving crimes, often outshining her male counterparts at the Melbourne Police Department. Sound like just another Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes? Think again. Phryne is also a feminist.

Based on the series of novels by Kerry Greenwood, Phryne is an independent woman. Having inherited a small family fortune during World War I, Phryne doesn’t have to work. She could have her pick of a husband and spend the rest of her days reading, knitting, or traveling. Instead, she decides to start solving crimes to earn money. She builds her business from the ground up like any modern day entrepreneur.

However, the television series has made one significant change. In the books, Phryne is 28, which according to Downton Abbey, is past marriageable age. This seems modern enough (and probably quite scandalous for the time), but in casting Essie Davis–who is in her 40s–as Phryne, the series has created one of the few “older,” independent, sexually liberated female characters in television history. Davis herself cited Samantha Jones in Sex and the City as the only other television counterpart to Phryne.

So let’s talk about sex. Phryne has a string of lovers, both in the show and the book series. However, she perhaps possesses a unique set of feelings for her emotionally reserved male counterpart on the Melbourne police force, Detective Inspector Jack Robinson (Nathan Page). The show plays off their chemistry by trotting out the somewhat tired will-they-won’t-they dance, yet these two still make it a compelling tango to watch unfold. Their relationship is an example that speaks even further to Phryne’s independence. Like some female characters might, she doesn’t sit around and wait for Jack to figure things out. She continues to be herself, which means falling into bed with next man she takes a fancy to.

But it is precisely for her sexual liberation that Phryne has been criticized by American viewers. In 2013, the first season became available on Netflix. Shortly afterward, some viewers left comments saying the show would be more enjoyable if Phryne wasn’t such a “tramp” and “obnoxious airhead.”

Jezebel wrote a piece about the comments. Miss Fisher author Greenwood said she had been expecting outrage over her liberated, independent heroine for ages. But she didn’t receive a single complaint when the show aired on Australian television. “Not once. Not even from old ladies. Not even from nuns,” Greenwood said in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald.

In fact, Greenwood finds Miss Fisher no different than similar male characters who solve crimes for a living. James Bond woos and beds a different woman in every film and is a hero to men and boys. “No one thinks their multiple lovers are indications of slutishness,” Greenwood pointed out.

Davis said in an interview with NPR that she was sent the Jezebel link and thought the reactions to it were fantastic. “The reactions towards the outrage were so powerful and outspoken. And that so many people who, on the Jezebel site, were like, ‘Right, well, if that’s what everyone’s saying about it, I’m watching it.’”

The series, when it comes to sex and violence, is actually quite tame. Even though the show features a different murder every week, the killings and violence are downplayed, and the sexual liberation of Phryne receives the same treatment. There’s the flirting, the first embrace, but then the show cuts to the next scene, leaving everything after implied. Or at the most, the pre-coital scene cuts to the post-coital, a pair of lovers ensconced in bed.

Her backstory, which comes out in bits and pieces in the series, is just as fascinating. She grew up poor in Melbourne and only after her English cousins died during World War I did her father inherit their peerage line, making him a count and her the Honorable Miss Fisher. During the Great War, Phryne ran off to France where she joined a French woman’s ambulance unit, where she received an award for bravery. After the war, she worked as an artist’s model in Montparnasse for a few years, before continuing to hop around Europe. In the book series, she’s returned from England back to her roots in Melbourne.

Phryne has an amazing cadre of characters she’s befriended and employed. Despite her statement that she’s “never understood the appeal of parenthood,” she’s certainly not selfish and takes in a young girl, Jane, as her ward in the second episode. Her relationship with her new maid/assistant, Dorothy “Dot” Williams, blossoms into a true friendship throughout the course of the series. At first, Dot is quite reserved, sheltered, and very Catholic, but under Miss Fisher’s influence and tutelage, she becomes much more than confident in herself and turns into a true asset to Phryne’s business.

Phryne met her best friend Mac while she was serving on the French ambulance unit. Mac is a physician and dresses androgynously, but her sexuality is never a point of contention or question in her friendship with Phryne. To round out her household, Phryne employs—funnily enough–a man named Mr. Butler as her butler and Bert and Cec, former dock workers, who drive a taxi and conduct odd jobs for Miss Fisher, both around the house and as part of her investigations. In the books, Bert and Cec are also “red raggers,” a term from that era for socialists.

The show is a delightful romp through the decadence of the late 1920s and while hemlines are higher, Phryne still butts heads with menfolk about her line of work. Frequently referred to as a “lady detective,” Phryne seems to have taken this sexist term and turned it into a calling card for herself, but she still gets talked down to by plenty of men. In fact, her relationship with Detective Inspector Jack Robinson is at first antagonistic. He wants her to butt out of his investigations and mind her own business, he threatens to arrest her for breaking and entering, and only allows her to stay in the room during an autopsy if she won’t say a word. Over time, however, they become partners. He wants her opinions on his investigations, and she wants him there for a second line of defense and in order to use his official title to secure records and information she otherwise wouldn’t be able to obtain.

Australia was one of the first countries that gave women the right to vote, passing the law in 1902. Once soldiers left for the war in Europe, women emerged from the home to fill the jobs left empty by men, which included factory and domestic work, nursing, teaching, and clerical and secretarial positions. Of course, women were paid less than men so even once men returned from the war, many employers wanted to keep women on the payroll because they cost less. Australian politician M. Preston Stanley openly confronted male arrogance and encouraged women toward independence. In 1921, Edith Cowan was the first woman to be elected to the Australian parliament. And of course, the 1920s were the age of the flappers, women who believed in social equity, rather than political. Social equity for the flappers meant women were allowed to drink in bars like men and enjoy all the recreational activities that men did. Not all women embraced this new movement, however. Some women of an older generation, called “wowsers,” objected to these new-fangled practices. (See Phryne’s Aunt Prudence.)

If you have a penchant for 1920s fashions, love detective shows, or just enjoy watching a sassy woman kick some ass, then Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is a shiny gem of a show in a sea of superhero movies, True Detectives, and Game of Thrones.

Lauren Byrd has worked in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles and New York. She currently writes a weekly series on her blog, 52 Weeks of Directors, focusing on a female filmmaker each week.

Negotiated Identities and Gray Oppositions in Ridley’s ‘American Crime’

With that said, even the traditional gender binary is flipped on its head—the women of the show uphold the patriarchal system that controls them, while the men are often portrayed as effeminate and oppressed by the same system that is supposed to give them power. Yes. Take a second while you process that.

This guest post by Sean Weaver appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

When I was a young preteen kid, my dad told me tales of how Miami Vice and Magnum, P.I. once helped him entertain the dream of becoming a private detective. He was so enamored by detectives and the law that he took a college course on crime, criminal investigation, and the law. Unbeknownst to him, I remember stumbling across one of his old tape recorders, hitting play, and listening to his own secret sting operation play out. Perhaps that’s where I began my long career of advocating social justice–justice against a system that is seriously flawed.

With all nostalgia and conspiracy theories aside, at first glance, Jonathan Ridley’s (director of 12 Years a Slave) American Crime seems like one of those old school detective thrillers, the likes of which have entertained American television and cinema since the 1980s. Up to its premiere on March 5, 2015, I had seen previews on ABC. I imagined it would be everything I had hoped in a detective drama: the gritty neo-noir tone, the masculine detective hero out to solve the un-solvable case, and the plot line driven by suspense and a nagging “Who dun it?” Instead, what I came across is a show that is powerfully poignant, thought-provoking, and one that delves the viewer deeper into the conditions of the human experience.

This isn’t a show aimed at entertaining. It is a show that relies on provoking the viewer into moving past that cushy comfort zone of self-identification, and questioning the very foundations that control our daily lives: social justice, race, and gender. In her review on American Crime in The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley beautifully captures the sentiment and driving force of this show. She states, “This series is at heart a murder mystery—someone has been killed, and the show withholds who did it. But solving the crime isn’t the point. The murder is a clue to the mysteries of character, experience, and self deception…”

It is a murder mystery. But, as Stanley so eloquently puts it, it isn’t. It’s so much more. In the introduction to her book Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective, film critic Philippa Gates writes:

“The detective genre has traditionally been a male-centered one based on the social assumption that heroism, villainy, and violence are predominantly masculine characteristics. The detective genre has traditionally been a male-centered one based on the social assumption that heroism, villainy, and violence are predominantly masculine characteristics…Not only is the genre male-centered, it is also hero-centered, tending to adhere to a structure of binary oppositions— good/bad, civilized/uncivilized, law/crime, order/chaos, and heroes/villains…[However] Not all detective films make absolute distinctions between these oppositions, and the examination of the indeterminate, ‘gray’ area between heroism and anti-heroism also proves illuminating in terms of the social mores and attitudes toward crime and law that it can reveal.”

Gates rightly points that not all detective films, and in this case show, make absolute distinctions in these traditional masculine tropes/themes. American Crime focuses on illuminating this “gray” area that reveals the social mores and attitudes toward crime and law, and in turn attitudes on crime, race, and gender in American society. It forgoes the masculine detective hero out to solve the crime, and instead focuses on those impacted by such crimes—whether they are guilty by circumstance/hearsay, victims in their hurt, or even willing participants. Like Stanley also points out, this “gray” area exists in the things the characters fail to say or do. By focusing on this “gray” area, viewers can truly come to appreciate the complexities of this astounding show.

Set amidst the dark and drug-filled backdrop of San Modesto, California, the show centers primarily on four families and the suspects associated with a high profile murder, all poised to give into the collision course of hate, fear, and suspicion that guide their highly racialized and gendered lives. In short summary for those who haven’t yet seen American Crime, the driving plot is that a White man is killed by a Black man, under the guise of a “hate crime.” Hold on to that for a second. A Black man is charged with committing a hate crime against a White man. Talk about flipping the traditional binary. With that said, even the traditional gender binary is flipped on its head—the women of the show uphold the patriarchal system that controls them, while the men are often portrayed as effeminate and oppressed by the same system that is supposed to give them power. Yes. Take a second while you process that. And finally, each character is hell-bent on seeking a social justice, whatever that may be, that reasserts their own existence. I’d rather not give away to many more details. Take my word for it, watch it.

With all the background stuff out of the way, the task of unpacking the complex lived realities of the Skokie and Nix families is rather daunting. However, at the head of the Skokie family is Barbra Hanlon (Felicity Huffman), mother of the murdered White man, and ex wife of Russ Skokie (Timothy Hutton). Barb fits all the characteristics of the stereotypical suburban middle aged White woman. She is assertive, grieving, and every bit fearful of those she perceives as “other.” She is the walking parrot of the patriarchy, and embodies all its masculine ideals. She wields power, through her very own existence. So much so, that if you hadn’t watched the first few episodes, you would swear that she was the intended murdered victim.

She creates fact from the truths she is unable to face. She decries her son a hero, even after authorities question her son’s involvement in an illegal drug cartel: “You want me to say stuff about my son that isn’t true? He is a war hero, a veteran.” Finally she gives into the easy out of declaring racism and her son’s murder a hate crime, knowing that the lead suspect of her son’s murder is in a relationship with a White woman. She groups people by the stereotypes engrained in her social upbringing—even going as far as declaring, “It was probably one of those illegals.” At one point, she comes into her power and wields it, well, like a man—even going as far as purchasing a firearm. The feminist in me cringes at this description. Because on the surface it seems like the stereotype of the grieving hysterical mother is being perpetuated once again. But there comes a point in the show where the viewer realizes she is not just a woman facing “hysteria.” No, the show is pushing past the perceived identities we take so much stock in. Instead, it shows how easily it is for the oppressed to become the oppressors by wielding fear and distrust. It also shows how people often negotiate the power of their identities at the expense of others.

The antithesis to Barb’s masculine ideals is her ex-husband, Russ. Like his wife, Russ takes stock in illusions that the exterior just needs to be brushed off. Russ is the failed man. When I say failed man, I mean he fails to live up to the expectations of the patriarchal world that controls his life. He is weak, timid, and ultimately unable to hold ground with his wife. At one point Barb delivers the ultimate emasculation speech, concerning where and who should bury their dead son exclaiming, “You walked out. You no longer get to say you’re his father.” The viewer becomes perplexed and is left with figuring out whether she is right or wrong. Is he the hero because he has returned? Does he return to step into the perceived masculine role of putting the pieces back together? Does his masculinity rely on the perceived social norm that the man is the back bone of family? Has he really overcome his gambling addiction? For Russ, the answer is yes, because countless times he declares, “We need to be a family.” In the end, Russ can only reclaim his own lost masculinity by taking his own sense of justice. In the final episode, Barb is distraught that the man she deems murdered her son is released. Her masculine veneer fades, and the viewer is left with a defeated woman realizing the realities she has fabricated are nothing but lies. After being cast off by Barb in a moment of rare intimacy between the two, Russ returns home to the gun that Barb has entrusted in his care. She has rejected his last attempt to once again reunite the family, his last attempt to be a man. He fails to be the hero, and instead becomes the villain he has tried to protect his family from by murdering Carter Nix (Elvis Nolasco).

On the receiving end of the prosecution is the Nix family. Carter Nix stands accused for the murder of Matthew Skokie. While the show never reveals whether or not Carter killed Skokie (which to me is a nod to the infamous system in which the guilty go free and the innocent accused), the viewer is left to come to their own conclusion. The facts are plentiful, but the truth is even harder to discern, and is found only in what is left unsaid. On the surface, it might seem like the show is reproducing the Black “thug” stereotype; Carter is a drug addict dating a White woman with the same problem. In fact, every chance they get the prosecution tries to save Carter’s girlfriend Aubry (Caitlin Gerard) from the menacing Black man: “Give us something to put him away.” However, Carter is far from the stereotypes that seem to define his life, and consequently his actions. Like his White counterpart Russ Skokie, Carter is a defeated man, emasculated in every sense of the word. While the circumstances differ, the same power structure is at play. The reason Carter relies on drugs is to create realities he wishes to see as truth. In one scene, Carter discusses how Aubry has saved his life with his sister Aliyah Shadeed (Regina King). He states he was miserable being an accountant, subservient to the White men that controlled his life. He then shares with her a magazine clipping of a Black man and White woman, the reality he wishes to share with Aubry, but cannot due to the interference of what is socially acceptable and not. He must negotiate his identity for drugs, and perceived lived realities, all while fighting an impenetrable system of control.

Finally the last person who seems to take a central role in the unfolding drama is Aliyah, Carter’s sister. She is every bit the counterpart to Barb Skokie. In fact, she is just as strong and willfully powered. She becomes the spearhead of a campaign to free Carter and is right to point the finger at a system that is massively corrupt. In one brilliant dialogue with Carter she states, “You sleep with their women, use their drugs, and take their guns. And you don’t expect to be locked up here?” She is a strong figure and is masculine in her own rights. However, in her fight to free Carter from his metaphorical chains she becomes just as guilty of upholding and instilling fear and hate. Like Barb, she becomes the victim; it is no longer her brother’s fight. In doing so, she manages to push Carter into breaking up with Aubry, forcing Carter to take sides in an invisible war. Just before the final scene in which her brother is murdered, Aliyah gives a speech in her mosque stating, “If we as a people cannot forgive, then we are cursed to hate.” The irony is that Aliyah was only able to forgive once her cause had been won. But her victory comes at the cost of her own negotiated identity, proving that the true American crime is not the physical act of murder itself, but something far more harmful: the negotiation and deception of one’s self.

Sean Weaver has a MA in English/Literature from Kutztown University. He is currently News Editor at Vada, an online magazine from the UK with a new queer perspective. When he isn’t reading or writing, he is hard at work looking for new ways to understand what it means to be queer.

Twitter: @levirush8

Blog: http://post-colonial-scholar.blogspot.com

Gibson’s Gonna Be OK: The Comfort of Hypercompetent Heroes

The lead character in BBC’s ‘The Fall’ is impervious to fear, but that’s OK. She’s doing the modern detective’s work of making us all feel safe in a world that’s anything but.

Written by Katherine Murray.

The lead character in BBC’s The Fall is impervious to fear, but that’s OK. She’s doing the modern detective’s work of making us all feel safe in a world that’s anything but.

The second season of The Fall just finished airing on the BBC and, while there’s been a slow decline in quality since the series premiere, it remains one of the only detectives shows – if not the only detective show – to acknowledge that violence against women is a built-in feature of patriarchal cultures rather than a random, strange coincidence. (Rebecca Solnit has a good essay about this in Men Explain Things to Me, if you want to get mad.)

The Fall is about serial killer named Paul Spector and Stella Gibson, the Gillian Anderson-looking detective who hunts him down. In his own mind, Paul is a dark, fascinating genius who’s playing a clever game of cat and mouse with the Irish police force. In almost everyone else’s mind, he’s a loser who hates women, and the police figure out who he is almost as soon as they start looking.

What makes The Fall an amazing piece of television is that it spits in the face of conventional serial killer narratives. Rather than being fascinated with Paul and how tortured and interesting he is, it’s focussed on how his hatred of women fits into a larger societal pattern, and how the lessons we learn about gender inform our beliefs and behaviours in life. It can be heavy-handed, but it’s also refreshing because it’s so different from the narrative we most often see.

The show spends roughly equal time on Spector and Gibson, but it’s Gibson we’re supposed to cheer for, and Gibson who’s built up as the ideal feminist woman. In the middle of a show full of terrifying, realistic, often heart-wrenching violence against women, Gibson’s there to make us feel safe. Not only because we know she’s going to catch Paul Spector and put him behind bars, but because she is completely and utterly awesome at everything. Perhaps unbelievably so.

The main source of tension in The Fall comes from fear and vulnerability. Watching the show, as a woman, you have the same chilling thought you have, as a woman, every time you’re walking alone at night, or hear a sound in your house while you’re sleeping: “What would I actually do if someone attacked me right now?” And the answer, if you’re honest, is that, even if you learned some krav maga one time, you would be just as terrified and just as dead as one of Spector’s victims.

The fear that men will attack us is something women carry around 24/7; it’s always simmering in the back of our minds, and The Fall forces us to look at it directly. In the middle of that horror, like a lifeline, or a warm blanket, Gibson the Terribly Competent stands impervious to fear. She can’t be intimidated by a bunch of tough guys on the street; she doesn’t freeze in an emergency; she can’t be made to feel ashamed for having sex; she breaks your nose if you don’t back off when she tells you to; she isn’t scared of some guy in a bar, or some guy in a limo, or even some guy who chokes other women to death. She looks at those guys with contempt and moves on with her life, without thinking the problem is her. No matter what, we know, she’s going to be OK.

It’s not actually unusual for the hero of a genre story to be hypercompetent. Like, we all understand that Jason Bourne is not realistic, right? And the guy from Mission Impossible? And that one detective from True Detective who said that time was round like a beer can? He was also improbably good at things.

What interests me about Gibson isn’t that it’s weird for the hero to be competent – it’s that, in this instance, her competence speaks to me and comforts me in way that Rust Cohle didn’t manage. She reminds me of another detective I like.

Appropriately, since Veronica Mars is set in high school, the tension in that story’s less about the fear of being killed and more about the fear of public humiliation. And Veronica, its hero, is impervious to all embarrassment.

In The Fall, it’s been implied that Gibson may have been assaulted at some time in the past, and that that’s what motivates her to work with female victims of violence. In Veronica Mars, it’s made explicit from the start that Veronica was the victim of the cruellest forms of high school bullying before she became the cynical, hypercompetent girl we know.

Whenever someone tries to insult, intimidate, or make fun of her, she has a snappy comeback to put them down. Whenever someone seems to get the upper hand against her, she manages to turn the tables somehow, making them look foolish in her place. In maybe the most blatant example, some popular boys she’s investigating put her name on the karaoke list in an attempt to embarrass her and make her back off. With only seconds to think it over, Veronica jumps up and sings the Blondie song “One Way or Another,” turning potential humiliation into a triumph as literally no real person could do.

Knowing that Veronica’s going to land on her feet whenever someone tries to bully her has the same warm blanket effect as knowing that Gibson can’t get scared. It’s not entirely realistic – for all of us, life involves at least some moments of fear and humiliation – but it gives us safe harbour in stories that are otherwise designed to make us anxious. In these particular contexts, Gibson and Veronica always know what to do, and the things they do always work. They allow us to confront the things that make us anxious with the safety net of knowing that it’s going to be OK.

And, if you’re going, “Katherine, that’s what all detectives do,” you’re sort of right.

Part of the point of detectives – at least modernist, soft-boiled detectives – is that they bring order to chaos and therefore restore our sense of safety. When Sherlock Holmes became popular, in Ye Olde Victorian England, it was in a context where urbanization, industrialization, and the expansion of the British empire had made people feel uncertain about what was happening. The world was changing really fast, there were a bunch of strangers around, and it felt like some random person could just murder you or steal your stuff and disappear into the crowd. (From a more racist point of view, it also seemed like a wizard from India could slip some potions in your tea, but that’s a different discussion from this.)

The calming figure of that era was a man with the superhuman ability to piece together tiny bits of information, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of literally everything that ever was, including scary foreign cultures. He was the safe harbour in the storm of modern living.

Flash forward about 100 years, and the same hero is reincarnated as House, a doctor who knows what’s wrong with you even when Web MD has no idea. Like Sherlock Holmes, House taps into our general fear that there is too much information for any one person to crunch. And, in a world where we are terrified that everything from our water bottles to our genes is trying to kill us in new, incomprehensible ways, the House version of Sherlock Holmes provides some safety, because House can see the pattern, House can understand what’s happening, and House can make some order out of chaos. Even if the MRI machine makes all your veins explode exactly in time for commercials, House will have the answer by the end.

The comfort of watching Gibson is both similar and different to the comfort of knowing that puzzles get solved. It’s the comfort of saying, “There’s someone who looks like me and, day to day, is not afraid to be alive. Someone who lives in the world I live in, that’s full of the terrors I face, and – realistically or not – is showing me what it could be like if I didn’t have to be scared.”

It’s a powerful counterpoint to the Man Kills Loads of Women – Is Special, Tortured Genius story that Spector thinks he’s starring in. This is Woman Is Not Afraid to Walk Down the Street; Woman is Not Afraid to Say No; Woman Isn’t Worried That She’ll Be a Total Drag if She Points Out What a Sexist Jerk You’re Being. It’s a different kind of fantasy than Knowing Lots or Solving Things – it’s Having a Right to Exist, opposite the story of a man who chokes women to death to feel strong. It’s the writers consciously and deliberately preventing this from being a story where you should have carried some mace to the bathroom, if you didn’t want to get killed in your house.

What’s different about Gibson isn’t that she’s extra specially good at stuff – it’s that the forces she’s facing off against are specifically aimed at women. The fear that she’s shielding us from is a fear that most men don’t carry around. The Fall, in its graphic and terrifying depictions of violence, would be unbearable to watch if Gibson wasn’t always at the centre, reminding us what life would be like if we didn’t have to feel afraid.

Different monsters require different kinds of heroes to defeat them. Gibson is the right kind of hero to face this kind of monster, and the strength of The Fall may be that it’s the first show to know which monster we’re trying to fight.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

A Long Time Ago, We Used to Be Friends: The ‘Veronica Mars’ Movie

So, how does one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever fare when it’s all said and done? I’m gonna go with: meh. Though the premise itself wasn’t bad and I loved being back in that world, the creator and director, Rob Thomas, just tried to cram too damn much into 107 minutes.

Veronica Mars Movie Poster — *Veronica Mars* movie poster

Written by Amanda Rodriguez
Mild Spoilers

I’ve been a fan of the Veronica Mars TV show for the last 10 years, so it’s only fitting that I was inordinately excited about the Veronica Mars movie, where Veronica comes back to her hometown of Neptune for her 10 year high school reunion to clear her ex-boyfriend, Logan Echolls, of murder charges. The film aired in select theaters on March 14 (and is now available for digital download on Amazon and iTunes). In anticipation of the film release, I wrote a review last November called “Why Veronica Mars is Still Awesome.” Face it: I’m a marshmallow.

A reference to the pilot episode, Veronica Mars fans are lovingly called "marshmallows" — In reference to the pilot episode, *Veronica Mars* fans are lovingly called “marshmallows”

So, how does one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever fare when it’s all said and done? I’m gonna go with: meh. Though the premise itself wasn’t bad and I loved being back in that world, the creator and director, Rob Thomas, just tried to cram too damn much into 107 minutes. For the show, Thomas had three years and three seasons, comprising 64 episodes at roughly 43 minutes a pop to build the story, the mystery, the relationships, the characters, the drama, and the amazing humor. 107 minutes isn’t nearly enough time to catch us up after 10 years away, to solve a crime, to build that rapport between beloved characters, and to give all the fans everything they wanted. It’s just too tall of an order.

The VMars team is back with Wallace & Mac — The VMars team is back with Wallace and Mac

Because they were trying to do too much, the character interactions ended up falling flat. Who have these people become, and why have they changed? Where is the biting sarcasm of Logan Echolls? He joined the military, which seems symbolic of a huge personality shift, or is it just an excuse to show him in a military uniform (whites no less)? Where’s the kinship between Veronica and Wallace or the abiding love between Keith and Veronica?

Not enough smart, sassy woman interactions — Not enough smart, sassy ladies killing it

Perhaps in part because of the lackluster character interactions, the plotlines are also lacking in luster. The mystery is half-baked, and even the obligatory Veronica Mars love triangle is a weak dud of a plot point with passion being largely absent from the players (Veronica, Piz, and Logan).

Logan takes Veronica "the long way home" per her request — Logan takes Veronica “the long way home” per her request

The Veronica Mars movie is even a bit too gimmicky. Logan in military whites, the endless stream of celebrity cameos, and the massive wet t-shirt boy fight are all a bit over the top. Now, I like celebrity cameos, and I did laugh at the outlandishness of the lengths the movie went just to give us a glimpse of Logan in a drenched v-neck, but, dammit, VMars has come dangerously close to jumping the shark.

Gender role reversal with boys in a wet t-shirt fight? Check.

Dare I confess it? I also missed the clothes. Long have I loved Veronica Mars’ fashion sense, and long have I worked to emulate her sassy ensembles.

At least the purse made an appearance... — At least the purse made an appearance…

Because of a certain baby bump actress Kristen Bell was sporting, the costumers had to get creative with her wardrobe, which left us with a lot of blazers and muted colors. Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful that Kristen Bell decided the project was important enough to film during her pregnancy. However, both Veronica and I have aged 10 years, and I was hoping to get some tips from the master on how to stay sassy into my 30s.

On the up side, the Veronica Mars movie did its damnedest to include all the important faces from the past like Dick Casablancas, Keith Mars, Madison Sinclair, Mac, Wallace, Weevil, Leo D’Amato, Deputy Sacks, Celeste Kane, Corny, and on and on. The film also saw fit to include some not-so-important faces like steroid trafficking baseball player, Luke Haldeman, and son-of-butler poker cash stealing Sean Friedrich, but it’s comforting to know that literally everyone wanted to come back to reprise their Veronica Mars roles. Not only that, but the movie is lovingly packed with a barrage of in-jokes for the long-time fans who’ll catch on to every wink, nudge, and nod.

Madison Sinclair finally gets her commupance — Madison Sinclair finally gets her comeuppance

From a feminist standpoint, it’s about damn time Veronica finally saved herself all by herself from the scary, sticky situation she gets herself into hunting a murderer in Neptune. The film also leaves some mysteries open and sets up a new Veronica Mars future with the possibility of a new Veronica Mars spin-off (please don’t let it be a bumbling Dick Casablancas detective agency show). Since I’m a marshmallow, I’ll cherish this last hurrah in the world of Veronica Mars and keep my fingers crossed for a spin-off, but from the objective viewpoint of a film/TV critic, the Veronica Mars movie just isn’t up to snuff. There was simply too much ground to cover, too many gags, and not enough character development to let the movie live up to its legacy as the best kind of storytelling, characterization, humor, and wit television had to offer.

The super fun drinking game that I came up with for the show still works pretty well for the movie: Vodka Tonic with a Lime Twist & Veronica Mars. I hope you’ll play! [End shameless plug.]

Read also: “Why Veronica Mars is Still Awesome” and “The Relationships of Veronica Mars“

Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.