Veronica Mars ** (2014, Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, Enrico Colantoni, Jamie Lee Curtis, Percy Daggs III, Gaby Hoffmann, Ryan Hansen, Jerry O’Connell, James Franco) – Movie Review

Here’s a bit of an oddball curio. A US telly show from 2004-2007 that no one here in the UK seems to have heard of gets a belated big-screen spinoff thanks to Kickstarter, which raised $2million in funding from the public in just ten hours back in 2012.

Back them, as now, it starred Kristen Bell as a pushy girl amateur private detective and Enrico Colantoni as her dad, the real PI, the former Sheriff Keith Mars. Veronica is now in her mid or late 20s, and about to start a job with Jamie Lee Curtis’s top New York law firm when an old classmate is murdered in her hometown and she’s called back into investigating mode to help her old flame Logan Echolls.

The totally unsurprising, way-too predictable screenplay has a murder mystery that a computer could have written, but it helps a lot that the script is peppered with in-jokes and surprisingly barbed and incisive one-liners, though not many of them are actually laugh-out-loud funny. The bland plot is right out of Murder She Wrote, a properly TV episode affair, which honours the film’s roots in telly and allows one character actually to call Veronica ‘Angela Lansbury’ (‘you’ve aged quite well!’).

Bell is a class act, sassy and sprightly, and, though playing such a pushy, snoopy character, still charismatic and not alienating with too much aggression. She shares such unusual good chemistry with Colantoni that you can really believe they’re daughter and father. Jason Dohring plays Logan Echolls and Percy Daggs III is another, newer flame, Wallace Fennel, but alas neither have been given much to do except support the star, which they do loyally.

Gaby Hoffmann is good value as old classmate Ruby Jetson, Ryan Hansen is funny as an airhead surfer dude called Dick Casablancas, Jerry O’Connell does a great line in smirking villainy as the Sheriff and James Franco plays James Franco, self-publicising shamelessly and desperately, but not completely unappealingly. Well, hey, we like Franco, don’t we?

I’d expect this entirely pleasing enough, easy-viewing movie to be quite popular, and sequels may well be required. Well, all those Kickstarter folks are going to need their money back, I guess, to back Veronica Mars 2: Mars Attacks. (Just guessing on that title!)

© Derek Winnert 2014 derekwinnert.com