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. 

Death In Paradise

Paradise Lost

Death In Paradise
USA 2006 Directed by Robert Harmon 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone 1

Warning: Some big spoilerage.

The third of the Jesse Stone TV movies, based on Robert B. Parker’s crime novels, is Death In Paradise. Once again we join the chief of police in Paradise, Massachusets as played, very thoughtfully and introvertedly, by Tom Selleck (an actor I’ve always liked but barely seen because he doesn’t usually star in the films I would want to see... it’s only because my dad loves these Jesse Stone films that I’m discovering them now*). 

This one seems to have a lot going on in it and starts off with the discovery of a corpse in water... which has only been there about three weeks but, that’s enough to make identification hard (it almost looks like a mummy). It turns out it’s the body of a thirteen year old girl and Jesse and his department have to find out who murdered her... although it takes a while to identify just who she is, at first. 

Meanwhile, there’s another sub plot involving a woman who is regularly abused by her husband whenever he drinks, in a domestic violence case. This one actually did not end up where I thought it would but, yeah, there are consequences to the team of regulars in the pursuit of this one. 

And talking about sub plots... two more things Jesse has to deal with is a) dating a local doctor from a college and b) trying to give up drinking by seeing a psychiatrist. I’m guessing the drinking stuff will take a few movies to sort out (and then I’m guessing a backslide for Jesse too) and, I don’t know if the woman he’s dating hangs over into anymore of the movies either... time will tell I guess. 

Here’s a thing though... of the two main cases which Jesse is dealing with in this story, the murder and the domestic violence... both trails end in death. In fact, Jesse either kills or gives rise to a kill in self defence, three people when all is said and done. So, yeah, although I enjoy Selleck playing the monosyllabic, often silent type of person, he does have his moments where he becomes a man of action, so to speak. I’m not sure that’s a good spin for the character and I’ll have to keep an eye on his body count in future, I think. 

Two more quick things. 

In a couple of flashback sequences, as Stone is trying to figure out how the girl got to be at the bottom of a lake, weighted down, we see some shots of her under water a little like the lady in the water in the second of Frank Sinatra’s Tony Rome films, Lady In Cement (without the nudity). And then, later in the episode, a ghostly vision of her appears to Jesse in his office, saying what Molly will say when she enters a few seconds later, to highlight to Stone that it’s an important clue and that he should follow it up. So this is interesting stuff here and I’m wondering if he’ll have any other ghostly visions as the film series continues. 

Once again, Selleck is surrounded by good actors including regulars (so far) Viola Davis as Molly Crane and Kohl Sudduth as Suitcase... both who work under him. Here’s another thing though... and this is the big spoiler here folks... I said one of the things Stone is working on has consequences later down the line. When the wife beater fires a shot off in the local supermarket, Stone is forced to shoot him dead (he fires twice in the end because the first shot doesn’t incapacitate the perpetrator) but shortly afterwards he discovers that the shot that went wild from the guy has hit Suit in the head. So for the rest of the episode, Suit is in a coma in a hospital bed and Jesse and Molly take turns to read to him, to try and spark some kind of response. And, as the story concludes, Jesse is still reading to the unconscious Suit before the credits roll. So I’m kind of on tenterhooks now to see if the character survives to come back for the next film in the series or not. I’m kind of hoping he will but, obviously, with him in a coma, they could string this one out for quite some time. 

I guess I’ll know soon enough because, that’s me done on the third of the Jesse Stone movies, Death In Paradise. I’m liking these a lot more than I thought I would and am looking forward to watching the next one soon. 

* I wrote this review about a year before he recently passed away.