Jesse Stone: Innocents Lost (2011)

I enjoy all of the Jesse Stone mini series. To bad they were not filmed in the New England area and Boston. I'm sure the costs would have been substantially higher

Apparently I didn't watch the same movie as the other reviewers on here. I never heard of Jesse Stone before. Didn't know it was a character with several movies. This was the first one I saw and I can already tell you for sure that it was also the last one. I also didn't know it was going to be a television movie. Nothing wrong with that if it's a good one. But the problem is that it's just not a good one. Jesse Stone played by Tom Selleck is an annoying slow character, not pleasant to watch. The story is also very boring. They sometimes make references to stories from other movies in that series so if you didn't watch any other ones than it's even more boring. The glory days from Tom Selleck in Magnum are clearly over. Lousy television movies like this one are just right for him. But not for me to watch.

I've read the books by Robert Parker and Paradise is filled with creepy, gloomy characters, so all the movies are certainly spot on. I can get past the cryptic and stilted dialog in the books because I'm curious to see how the plot plays out but for some reason, the dour characters become tedious when you have to actually watch them glumly interact with each other. It's also highly annoying to listen to the cast beat to death the 'it's a small town' gag from beginning to end. I was amazed to see that even the dog looked like a miserable wretch. Tortured characters are always a great hook in both books and movies but there is such a thing as beating a premise to death and Mister Parker is no slouch in this department. The writers, directors and producers of the series of movies would have been prudent to dial back most of the author's character idiosyncrasies because they're more irritating than compelling.

Fans of this serious deserve a medal for being the most patient fans on the planet. Most fans have had to resort to DVD supplements (or the Hallmark Channel) to even catch all the installments. Luckily places like Office Depot and big chain Grocery Stores carry most of the DVD's cheap. CBS hasn't been very helpful, the first two episodes were aired in reverse order and the latest two episodes (parts 6 and 7) put on a shelf for over a year while negotiating with Tom Selleck to do the TV series BLUE BLOODS. Part 6 ultimately aired with little fanfare in a terrible time slot and Part 7 finally found a decent home (and will be released on DVD August 2nd, probably). Even if you were able to catch all of them on TV the time period between films was pretty lengthy to remember some of the plot points in the continuing story line. The 6th film, SEA CHANGE, for example, the one that sat on the shelf and then given a bad time slot, brought back guest characters from all the previous episodes. Nifty idea if you watch all the DVD's in a month, but not spread out over 3 years. For the record in case you need to catch up, the story order of the DVD's (not the order they were aired or related to the book title order) are: 1. Night Passage 2. Stone Cold 3. Death in Paradise 4. Sea Change 5. Thin Ice 6. No Remorse 7. Innocents Lost. So are they worth it? Yes. They are character-driven moody dramas with just enough quirky moments to add some jokeless humor. Jesse Stone is a cop and a drunk who goes from being an LAPD robbery-homicide detective to police chief of a small town in Massachusetts. He solves all the cold cases (unsolved crimes), including the grisly ones that no one in town even knew existed, merely as a way to pass the boredom. This actually upsets the status quo of townsfolk that would rather leave their not-so-peaceful past buried. Story lines unexpectedly spill into sequel films making this a continuous story-line series.