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"Director: Rob Thomas; Screenwriter: Rob Thomas, Diane Ruggiero; Starring: Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, Ryan Hansen, Krysten Ritter, Enrico Colantoni, Percy Daggs III; Running time: 107 mins; Certificate: 12A  The task of resurrecting any beloved franchise brings with it a certain degree of responsibility to the fans. The closest counterpart to the Veronica Mars movie, which resurrects Kristen Bell&amp;#039;s sharp-tongued teenage sleuth from the small screen against all odds, is Joss Whedon&amp;#039;s 2006 sci-fi Serenity, the long-awaited theatrical sequel to his short-lived space western series Firefly. But where Whedon owed Firefly fans (aka the Browncoats) a figurative debt for their ongoing support, Mars creator Rob Thomas owes his fans (aka the Marshmallows) in a much more specific and literal sense \u00E2\u20AC\u201C the film is funded entirely by them via a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. So what&amp;#039;s most impressive about Veronica Mars is that for all this history, it plays as much more than fan service. Picking up nine years on from the show&amp;#039;s rainy parting shot of a despondent Veronica, Thomas&amp;#039;s script finds her settling in for a comfortable future in New York, interviewing at a prestigious law firm and getting serious with the stable, dependable Piz (Chris Lowell), having left the detective business and all its personal costs behind her.   But back in her hometown of Neptune, California, the adrenaline rush beckons: Veronica&amp;#039;s troubled ex Logan (Jason Dohring), with whom she shared a tempestuous on-off relationship throughout the series, is suspected of murdering his girlfriend. In classic &amp;#039;one last job&amp;#039; style, she finds herself irresistibly drawn back to her old life as the mystery gets deeper and more dangerous.  The new Veronica Mars is more muted and less quippy than its younger self, but the series was always steeped in darkness and every twist here feels in keeping. The Neptune police department has gone from incompetent to deeply corrupt, leaving the town in a state that borders on post-apocalyptic \u00E2\u20AC\u201C and Veronica courting a corporate gig in Manhattan feels designed to leave fans longing for her to shirk authority and expose institutional hypocrisy like the good old days.  The film plays well as a smart, dark murder mystery in its own right. Bell is engaging and charismatic as she ever was as a mellowed out but still steely Veronica, and Thomas ensures no prior knowledge is required for the newly converted. An extended high school reunion sequence features familiar faces and nods to canon aplenty but works primarily as plot development, and sees former outcast Veronica publicly humiliated in a manner that harks back to all the show&amp;#039;s richest themes.  Inevitably given the spry running time, some returning characters fall more by the wayside than others: Wallace (Percy Daggs III) and Mac (Tina Majorino) are reduced to pure sidekicks, while reformed biker Weevil (Francis Capra) becomes a heavy-handed plot device in the portrayal of Neptune&amp;#039;s systemic class warfare.  Veronica&amp;#039;s world-weary father (Enrico Colantoni) and frat boy Dick (Ryan Hansen) are among the favourites who fare better, while Breaking Bad&amp;#039;s Krysten Ritter takes on an expanded role as one of several classmates who may have played a part in the murder. The less you know in advance about James Franco&amp;#039;s inspired cameo, the better.  The real emotional highs, the glorious moments of payoff, come only for the fans. Smouldering bad boy Logan, who in the series was never stable enough to offer Veronica more than dysfunctional passion and devastatingly sly wordplay, has matured into something closer to a conventional romantic lead, but Bell and Dohring&amp;#039;s chemistry is as electric as it ever was. It&amp;#039;s a remarkable thing to sense two actors&amp;#039; years of history in every frame, despite the dimly obligatory tone of their arc.   Thomas wore his film noir influences on his sleeve throughout the show, and many of the established tropes that re-emerge here \u00E2\u20AC\u201C notably the hardboiled narration in which Veronica mulls over her own addiction to danger and her mother&amp;#039;s alcoholism \u00E2\u20AC\u201C feel tailor-made for cinema. The climactic action set piece, too, is classic Mars: our heroine getting in over her head, ending up in physical peril and, crucially, using her smarts to save herself.  A cynical, dark thriller with a marshmallow centre, Veronica Mars is both a labour of love for a legion of fans, and the kind of shrewd, focused, character-driven mystery that has become an endangered species on the big screen.    "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/review/a556371/veronica-mars-review-a-dark-thriller-with-a-marshmallow-centre/>