Jessie Stone - No Remorse

Human Remorses

No Remorse
USA 2010 Directed by Robert Harmon 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone 1.

Warning: This one has some spoilers.

No Remorse, the sixth of the films presented in the Blu Ray set of Jesse Stone movies, is all set within Jesse Stone’s unpaid suspension from the job of Paradise police chief. It’s set both in Boston and Paradise and, typically for one of these Jesse Stone stories, it has at least two cases going on at the same time.

On the one hand we have Jesse (Tom Selleck) who, angered by his ex-wife’s calls, rips his land line out. He finally buys a cell phone but, it turns out, he can only use it when he’s out of his house in Paradise, because his home is in a no signal zone. Anyway, Boston homicide Captain Healy (Stephen McHattie), who is still recovering from the many gunshots he received at the beginning of the previous movie, Thin Ice (reviewed here), hires Jesse as a consultant on a double homicide with no apparent pattern or connection but, obviously done by the same killer. He says he needs his ‘coply intuition’ but, also, because the suspension is not sitting well with Jesse, who spends a lot of it on the end of a bottle of scotch. 

Meanwhile, Rose (Kathy Baker) and Suitcase (Kohl Sudduth) are trying to solve a case involving convenience stores which are robbed with the sales clerks beaten almost to death (or actually to death in the case of the one they are aware of in Paradise, as the story opens). However, it’s just the two of them on their own because the guy at the town council wants them and Jesse gone from the force... to make a clean sweep after the upcoming hearing for Jesse. So they need to solve the case... which they do with Jesse’s unofficial help, of course. 

So once again Selleck and his co-stars do wonders in this. Hasty Hathaway (Saul Rubinek) is out on parole but the actress playing his now ‘ex’ wife has been changed. She still wants to sleep with Jesse Stone, however. There’s a lot of character development in this one... or character building, if you will. We learn that Jesse loves his dog and is frightened of losing him. We see Rose grow closer to Jesse while she decides to divorce her husband. And we also see Jesse dating a nun... or at least having dinner with her, making good on his offer to take her out to dinner in the previous movie. And we hear the story of Jesse’s psychiatrist Dr. Dix (William Devane)... how and why he quit the police force to change his vocation (another grim tale). 

We also see the death of a regular character in the series... who we always know works for one of the questionable mobsters but who has a much bigger role this time around. Unlike the majority of how these Jesse Stone movies go, he doesn’t die at the hands of Jesse but, instead, kills himself where Jess can see him doing it, crossing the street when the green light shows and walking out into heavy traffic. 

All in all, this one is a good, solid episode and it even reunites Jesse with the young victim of an earlier installment. That being said, the ending of the episode is very much a cliffhanger... with Rose, Suitcase and eventually Jesse (and his dog), gathering for the hearing at the town council, where they all suspect they are going to get fired... roll credits. I guess we’ll find out what happened to them all in the next one.

So, yeah, No Remorse is another entertaining mix of mystery and police procedural, with Selleck once again very subtly playing Stone as an incredibly simple (though far from stupid) man who rolls with the punches as best he can and who follows his own moral code (which quite often has nothing to do with the legal system, it seems to me). And, once again, I’m very much looking forward to taking a peek at the next one as soon as possible. As the credits role, there’s a memorial statement to the writer Robert B. Parker (who wrote the original books and characters these films are inspired by), who died the year of this one’s release.

Thin Ice

Ice And Lows

Thin Ice
USA 2009 Directed by Robert Harmon 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone A

The fifth film in Sony’s boxed set of the complete Jesse Stone TV movies (to date) is Thin Ice and it’s a good one. It’s interesting also that, even though the Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone characters and also a couple of characters from Parker’s Spender books are in this, the film is not based on a pre-existing Parker novel, it just uses the characters.

Once again, Tom Selleck plays Paradise police chief Jesse Stone (he also has shares a writing credit on this one... I guess if you spend some time playing a character, you begin to know him) and he’s on thin ice with the members of the town council for not bringing in the cash with parking tickets etc and, instead, actually bringing unwanted attention to the town by solving real crimes. 

Things start strongly on this one as Jesse and his friend, series regular Stephen McHattie playing Boston police chief Captain Healy, are checking something out on a kind of amateur stake out in Boston. Healy gets shot almost to death and Jesse takes one in the arm while they sit in the car... regaining consciousness just in time to put one bullet wound in the fleeing gunman. After making sure Healy is in a relatively stable condition in the hospital, Jesse goes looking for the gunman... while simultaneously being pursued for the incident by Leslie Hope playing an internal affairs officer by the name of... drumroll please... Sydney Greenstreet (no, alas, not that one). During his investigation she, of course, ends up sleeping with Jesse. 

Meanwhile, a mother who has survived the death of her son in a high profile murder case in Mexico has come to paradise because of an anonymous letter she received some years later, telling her that her son is loved. She thinks he was switched and kidnapped but, new regular Rose, played once again by Kathy Baker, is working on this cold case with occasional aid from Jesse and also Suitcase, played again by Kohl Sudduth, who seems to actually be a lot smarter if still a little confused after his awakening from the coma in the last movie (after being shot in the movie before that). 

And it’s a really good one because the way these stories play out are explored in an interesting manner. Such as Greenstreet picking up on the number of people Jesse has killed, directly or indirectly, since the start of his tenure as police chief. Something which I think I mentioned in one of my previous reviews. And, oddly, while this issue is highlighted and brought into question, it’s also the first film in the series where nobody is actually killed violently through his direct involvement, despite the flurry of unexpected violence at the start of the movie. 

Another thing Greenstreet brings up is that Jesse’s MO is to frame people up to get themselves arrested or to produce evidence that they are part of a crime Jesse is working on and, bang on, that’s exactly how he resolves one of the two cases he’s working on in this one.

The other interesting thing about this one is it shows his psychiatrist Dr. Dix, played again by William Devane, as someone who, when he’s not trying to help Jesse out of the bottle (something which he hasn’t yet succeeded in doing), has his own demons he’s struggling with. It’s almost a throw away scene but I’m hoping/expecting they’ll maybe build on that in a future film... of which there are four more left to watch. 

Not much else to say on this one but it’s intriguing that Thin Ice didn’t air on television until two years after it was shot. I suspect that’s because this one leaves it as almost a cliffhanger ending with Jesse suspended from his job without pay until the council can build a case against him to fire him. So I guess we’ll see what happens from here. I hope to find out soon because I’m quite enjoying this film series and I want to see what happens next. 

Sea Change

A Hasty Return

Sea Change
USA 2007 Directed by Robert Harmon 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone 1

Warning: Many spoilers in this one.

Sea Change is the fourth of the Jesse Stone movies and, I have to say, it’s my least favourite in this nine movie box set so far. Not that it isn’t good... just not the best, I reckon. It’s also something of a transition episode in terms of the regular characters. Tom Selleck, of course, once again plays Jesse Stone, impeccably... but Viola Davis returns as Molly Crane for only one scene. When a lonely Jesse phones her in the middle of the night to ask how her pregnancy is going. So, his new police support person, is Kathy Baker as Rose Gamon. 

In this one, Jesse’s ex-wife puts a halt on their nightly phone calls as she is seeing someone else. So Stone slip slides back into alcoholism but, as his new psychiatrist (William Devane returning as Dr. Dix) tells him, he needs to keep busy if he wants to keep the drink away. Be that as it may, Paradise, Massachusets is a small town where not much crime has been happening of late. However, there is a reported rape by a young victim of an incident which took place on board one of the yachts on the annual Paradise boat race, which he half heartedly gives to Rose, partially to help get her back into field work but also because, he’s not sure he believes the girl. This subplot also involves the great Sean Young (from Blade Runner, reviewed here) as a boat race pleasure seeker. 

Meanwhile, he sees that there are three unsolved cases and so he takes the most important one, from some time in the 1990s, involving a huge bank robbery, which he goes at relentlessly. He goes to visit Hasty Hathaway (played by Saul Rubinek) who you may remember is in jail after the events of Stone’s first week or two on the job (and who hired Stone for the job of police chief in Paradise in the first place), as he realises his money laundering was probably involved in the robbery, as he ran the bank. 

About this time, Suitcase (played by Kohl Sudduth) finally wakes up from his coma after being shot in the head after the events of the previous movie in the series, Death In Paradise (reviewed here). But he’s a little different. He has no memory of being in hospital but he seems to have retained everything people told him or read to him while he was in his coma. He’s also suddenly found what Jesse once told him is ‘cop-ly intuition’ and, even though he’s not quite on active duty just yet, he works out what is really going on with the bank robbery case and gives Jesse the obvious lead he’s been missing. 

Of that, I have to say I figured out who did the bank job and just what had gone on way before anybody in the movie did. I just suspected it at first but when Jesse becomes romantically involved in one of the people who at first doesn’t appear to be that close to the case, I was pretty sure I knew what was going on. So that’s a shame because I’d have preferred not to have known until the reveal. 

Now, the rape case is interesting in this one because... and you could never get away with this now in the ‘me too’ climate... but it hinges on consent and basically takes the tact that, in this particular case, the so called victim has been fabricating aspects of the incident for her own gain. I’m glad that somebody was smart enough to portray this because it’s not always good to believe what you see on the surface. 

Now, I was expecting, hoping, that Sea Change would be an episode where Jesse didn’t actually have to kill anybody. I mean, all the while he’s being intimidated by the brother of the killer who Hasty shot to frame him for the intended murder of Jesse in his first case. There seems to be a peaceful resolution to this story but, just when you don’t expect it (so that’s good at least) the killer turns up in Stone’s home and nearly ends Jesse... who promptly puts a few bullets in him and, once again, adds to his phenomenal ‘small town’ body count. I’m wondering if we’ll get an episode where someone doesn’t have to die for a change but, hey, I’ve still got another five of these to watch and, yeah, although this one was a little disappointing, I’m still really enjoying them and look forward to what Jesse gets up to next.