Veronica Mars (2014)

7 of 10

Personal Bias Alert:  OFFICIAL VERONICA MARS BACKER (Yes, I contributed to the Kickstarter campaign)

            Any discussion of “Veronica Mars” has to address the elephant in the room:  the unusual way the film was financed.  It began as a low-rated television series with a devoted fan base whose stunts to keep the series on the air made national news.  They were unsuccessful, and “Veronica Mars” was cancelled after three seasons.  Subsequent DVD sales and Netflix viewing brought even more people to the series (including me) until it had such a large fan base that an extension of the series seemed plausible.  Warner Bros., who own the rights to the show, wouldn’t pony up the money, but they did allow creator Rob Thomas to do a Kickstarter campaign to see if the fans would finance a movie themselves.  Over five million dollars later, “Veronica Mars” was in the news again, this time as a green-lit, little-series-that-could success story.

            The reason the financing is so interesting (and, as it turns out, so influential) is because it inherently changes who the film is made for.  If Warner Bros. had decided to finance, Thomas would have been concerned with pleasing them, meaning he would have been trying to make the film accessible enough to make a lot of money.  With the fans as backers, Thomas is concerned (he said so himself) with pleasing the diehards who loved the series enough to chip in money in advance.  Thomas’s ultimate goal seems to be getting “Veronica Mars” started up again as a series, with the movie operating as the introduction back into the story (books and a web series have already been confirmed).

            So what happens when a television series is made into a movie specifically for preexisting fans?  Pandering, that’s what.  I’ve seen the series multiple times, so I caught all the references, in-jokes, and Easter eggs littered throughout the film.  A few would have been fine, but the amount that is crammed in leaves the film seeming more like an hour and forty-five minutes of people talking about how great “Veronica Mars” was instead of a new “Veronica Mars” storyline.

            An inherent difference between a television series and a movie is how much change is expected in a character’s situation.  In a movie, the character’s situation changes significantly, because it’s generally the only story we get about them.  In a television series or any other serialized medium, the character’s situation stays pretty much the same from week to week.  Writers Thomas and Diana Ruggiero have to find a balance between creating a satisfying film and the start (or middle?) of a serialized story.  They try to balance these expectations by creating a storyline in which the characters start in an entirely new place and move towards something more recognizable.  At the opening, Veronica has left the private eye business to become a lawyer in New York City.  She is pulled back in, and back to the small California town where she was raised, when her old flame Logan Echolls is accused of murder.  Veronica’s presence makes every character slide back into their old roles, and by the end everyone is essentially where they would have been if the writers had never made them leave in the first place.  It feels like Thomas and company are hitting the reset button, which is a bit unsatisfying.

The film, like the series, is such a mixture of genres that its tone can be hard to pin down.  The dialogue is quick-witted and humorous, the plot is a noir-style mystery, and the main character forms the center of a love triangle similar to what you see in many of today’s popular YA book series.  It’s one of the charms of the series (and one of the main reasons I like it so much), but I’m concerned that unaccustomed viewers will find the tonal shifts jarring.  If you’ve seen the series, then you know Veronica’s story often takes dark turns (the first season’s main mysteries included Veronica solving her best friend’s murder and her own sexual assault).  Without this knowledge, viewers might find the movie’s ending incongruous with the rest of the story.

            The movie exists to please its preexisting audience, and it largely succeeds.  While the story and characters are strong enough to draw in a few more fans (if they weren’t, then the series wouldn’t have developed such an ardent following in the first place), I doubt its audience will swell into significantly larger numbers.  This isn’t the best “Veronica Mars” can be, but if it serves as a gateway to more quality stories about Veronica and the gang, then this fan is satisfied.

Other Notes:

Ø    Creator Rob Thomas is NOT the lead singer from Matchbox 20.  They are two different Rob Thomas’s.

Ø    The music in this film is loud and distractingly clichéd.  Maybe you can get away with the swelling Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago” in television, but that moment was not earned in this film.

Ø    With almost every major character from the series appearing here, it’s telling how much the character of Duncan Kane was disliked.  No one even mentions him.

RIP Backup, the presumed dead dog of Veronica’s childhood.