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.