Veronica Mars

Having essentially kickstarted the career of Kristen Bell back in 2004, Veronica Mars ran for three seasons before getting the axe. Cut to 2013, and the Veronica Mars movie got kickstarted by Kickstarter, with fans of the show ponying up the dough to make sure it got made. And therein lays the problem: does the movie stay loyal to the fans and potentially alienate noobs to the Mars universe, or attempt to go a bit more populist at the risk of upsetting her loyal legion of Marshmallows?

Picking up nine years after Veronica has left behind the world of being a teenage private detective in California, we find her in New York about to land a big job at a high powered legal firm and living a comfortable life with her current boyfriend Piz (Chris Lowell). Then word breaks that her ex-boyfriend Logan (Jason Dohring) is the prime suspect in murdering his pop star girlfriend, so Veronica flies back to her old town of Neptune, and soon gets reunited and embroiled with all her old high school friends and enemies, as the murder happened to coincide with their class’ ten year reunion.

Smartly written so that there’s enough here for Mars fans to get giddy about, but not so much that the uninitiated are drowning in references, more often than not the movie gets that tricky balance just right. What it doesn’t get right however is a properly engrossing mystery. While there are more snappy one-liners and smartly played out clues here to keep you interested, you’re very rarely hooked by proceedings.

It’s hard to tell whether that comes down to the fact that there’s a faint sense of heightened reality to the town of Neptune (one example: Logan goes on a date with a doppelgänger stalker of his deceased girlfriend just DAYS after she’s dead), or if it’s because the gallery of potential suspects are all so interchangeable that it’s difficult to care who the killer might be.

Still though, even if the plot is somewhat flimsy, there’s an awful lot of fun to be had here. Bell is having a ball returning to her breakout role, knocking out withering zingers every few minutes, and the cavalcade of celebrity cameos proves there’s still a lot of love for the show. So even if this doesn’t quite reach Serenity levels of movies-based-on-cancelled-shows, we wouldn’t so no to another trip to Mars. Just give the lady something better to solve next time.