Excellent but underrated film

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Blistering performances.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I really enjoy the Jesse Stone movies. Here is a man who became a drunk because of his cheating and now divorced wife. She cheated on him and he turned to booze as a solace. He gets a last chance job as police chief in a small New England town. In this particular movie he gets hired back as the chief after two officers are killed in an explosion. One is the son-in-law of the town council president, the other was the infamous and not very likable D'Angelo. The council president manipulated the firing of Jesse and the hiring of his son-in-law as the chief. It is seemingly poetic justice that the boy is dead and Jesse is back in charge. William Devane is back as Jesse's shrink. He is very good in this role. Rose and Suitcase have left the force because they just didn't like the new chief. He contacts Suitcase, who still has the weird sixth sense, on a fishing boat run by his father but Suitcase stays with his Dad on the boat. This is not what I expected. I thought Rose and Suitcase would both come back to the force. As the case widens more suspects come in to the scope of the investigation. Saul Rubinek is in the film as arestored city councilman after his release from prison. Now I thought his crime was a felony and would thus preclude him from holding office. Turns out Sal has been the driving force behind the drug trade in the area. William Saddler does an excellent job of playing the bottom feeding crime boss Gino Fish. Of course everything comes to a crescendo conclusion and Jesse solves the case to the chagrin of a few people. At the very end of the film Suitcase returns to the department. I sure hope there are more Jesse Stone movies in the offing.

what a stupid dialog! why repeated it all the time? why repeat another stupid sentence of dialog like "i never said so". like the author, robert p. parker and his novels, the whole movie series was following the pace and tone of the novels, slow, pretentious, and gloomy. but one thing i have to point out: the premise of this series has a major flaw: you think that the city council of paradise would be so desperate and short of choice to hire a drunken cop fired by the lapd to be the chief of police? the movie location chose somewhere in the northeast and shot the series in wintry and wet seasons, but this new episode has stupidly arranged a scene of the motel owner/manager watering the lawn in april? what a pretentious and stupid scene. the whole series is nothing but a sponge full of water, soaked to the extreme with slow sound track, moody song, gloomy wet wintry scenes on and on but at the same time, drink after drink, and then with lot of meaningless macro shots of jesse stone's dumb dog. hey, you can't keep using these kinda crap on and on, again and again: 'because i'm the police chief.", "i never said so." or 'what you're looking at (you damn dog)?" and this episode, well, the paradise police chief playing a one man job, holding the fort of the paradise police dept, playing the detective and murder investigation jobs and well, a solo highway patrolman and drinking liquors and coffee all the time. a senior lost his job, still own the house on the beach without worrying the mortgage payment and property tax, got lot of money to spend on his binge drinking, yappi coffee and $180.00 one hour session of brain/mind search. what a stupid and absurd scenario!

The problem with the Jesse Stone series in general is that they try to incorporate the various shows in relationship to his personal life. In other words, we get side tracked here and that's not very good.This episode was another perfect example here. More should have been stated about the grieving father-in-law. Was the son-in-law an innocent victim when Butler's car was fire-bombed? Who was Arthur? Was he just a hit-man? Saul Rubinek's character of Hasty was hastily put together. All of a sudden, he was a big deal in this.Rose (Kathy Bates) briefly appears. She always seems so depressed here. One wonders if she is just under contract to fulfill her role as Rose.The show was slow-moving and basically uneventful considering that a car bombing killing two police officers should have generated much more interest.

Maybe my expectations were too high? I've enjoyed previous "episodes" in this series of TV movies. There is always great scenery in which these stories take place.In this particular movie, the viewer gets shot out of their chair by a very unexpected jolt. It's all down hill from there. I was able to zip past all of the boring commercials, but most of the core of this movie was filled with scenes where the audience member is left wondering, "why?" I got a bit tired of watching Jesse and his dog "think." I would have turned this off and read a book had my wife not been there.It finally ended with some sort of sudden "baiting" by our drinking and mentally disturbed hero. I was glad it was over. There was a lot of potential, but action was not the focus of this movie.Watch at your own risk.