Jesse Stone: Benefit of the Doubt

source: Jesse Stone: Benefit of the Doubt

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.

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.

When two police officers are blown up in a police car while investigating a fire, Jesse Stone is brought back as the Chief of Police. The town council fired him; they now re-hire him, as one of the men on the council's son-in-law was one of the cops. Jesse breaks into his old office, where there is no staff and no action. He calls Rose (Kathy Baker) who is staying with her mother; she says she'll think about it. Suitcase decides to stay away as well. Jesse works to sort through what little he has: money in the trunk of the police car is but one. He speaks with his various sources: his analyst (William Devane), a Massachusetts State Patrol Captain (Stephen McHattie) a Mob kingpin (William Sandler), and the felonious Hasty (Saul Rubinek), now out of prison. Were the cops dirty? Who made the call to bring them to the site? Can Jesse keep from drinking his way through the case? Will Rose and Suitcase ever return? Somehow these characters grow on one. I still think Selleck is too one-note and depressed, though this script had a little humor in it. Still, people enjoy the show, and that's what counts.

As the previous reviewer mentioned, the opening scene garners much attention and promises of good things to come. Unfortunately, they never really do. Tom Selleck does a nice job. If it was another actor, I don't think I would have watched the whole movie. There are numerous mood shots where the camera just stays on the character a bit longer for my liking. The dog is cute (I believe it's Tom Selleck's actual dog) but he gets the same long camera lingering shots. After a while you couldn't help laughing when the dog comes on. There may be too many characters and they don't really get developed so the story does not flow. I don't want to spoil any of it for those who are sentenced to watch it, but you will find some of the occurrences to be a bit illogical. It's definitely not on par with Blue Bloods.

This show starts out with a bang, literally. In a small, coastal town, two policemen die in a car bombing while out on a routine call. That certainly got my attention. Retired L.A. detective Jesse Stone is appointed to investigate. After that, the story wanders. We get to meet the various locals who live in the gloomy community with its rocky coast and gray weather, a place which has clearly seen better days. It's filled with cynical people one comes to expect in a movie like this. As expected, Stone (played well enough by Tom Sellink) asks questions of people, trying to find clues. As far as I could tell, but only finds little hints. In fact, the investigation doesn't go anywhere until the last half hour and the ending was very rushed. It also seems as if a sequel is being set up at the end.

The eighth Jesse Stone movie, Benefit of the Doubt, was on the tube last night. I loved the first seven in the series but was disappointed in this one. Tom Selleck and Michael Brandman co-wrote it, with Brandman probably supplying the plot and Selleck the character. Just as Robert Urich became Spenser, Selleck has become Jesse Stone, the laconic, dark drinker of black coffee and Johnny Walker Red. This time, though, I got the feeling they were stretching for the Parker style and not quite reaching it. For example, after the new chief and one of his deputies are killed in an auto explosion, everyone keeps saying, "You didn't like him, did you, Jesse?" to which Jesse replies, "I don't believe I ever said that." Four times he's asked and four times he replies with the same words. Parker might have gone for two times, but never four. In fact, almost all the dialog is short and repetitive, but not quite up to Parker's standards. What can I say about the plot? Well, there wasn't much plot and much of what there was didn't make any sense. After the double killing, Jesse is temporarily made chief again. He goes to the police station but has to break in because they've changed the locks and the security code. He discovers a day-calendar sheet for April 24 with a cryptic series of letters and numbers. Why did he assume it was a clue into the death of the chief? Neither the viewer nor anyone else in Paradise knows. Rose and Suit have resigned from the force and both make only brief appearances. And Jesse seems to be the only one on the force. Paradise is a large enough city that there would be at least fifteen officers serving, but not a single one is ever seen after Jesse takes over as chief. Someone has been following Jesse for several days, following in a car almost riding Jesse's bumper. Jesse pulls him over and tells him not to follow him anymore. In the final scene, it's revealed that the man was a hit man with a contract on Jesse. Hasty Hathaway, the obnoxious auto dealer who had originally hired Jesse, is really the boss of Gino Fish, one of the biggest fish in the Boston racketeering pool. When Jesse seems to be getting close to the truth, Hasty takes his ill-gotten gains, what looks like nearly a million, and flees by speedboat. Jesse kills the hit man and is about to take Hasty, but Hasty gets away. End of movie. It felt too much like a series cliff-hanger looking forward to the next episode. I don't think there'll be another episode, and if there is, it had better be better than this one. The good news about Benefit of the Doubt is that ex-wife Jen is nowhere around and that Reggie, the sad-eyed retriever, is still trying to win Jesse's love.

Why do I always end up feeling conned & duped after watching a Jesse Stone episode? I go in full of high expectations, like going into a first rate restaurant: terrific menu, great atmosphere, beautiful surroundings. And then...little bitty tastes & teasers. I've always been a fan of Tom Selleck. He's a great-looking guy with a wry sense of humor & he's aged well (although I would gently suggest he have his hairdresser lighten up on the dense blacks - looks too phony). But he spends most of his time in this episode (& the last one as I recall) standing around doing a lot of thinking & brooding & posing. Selleck wears clothes better than any actor since Gary Cooper & he has some pretty snazzy outdoorsy threads in this one. But I wound up feeling like I was watching an elaborate Eddie Bauer commercial. As for the plot...what plot? Pieces of plots. Pieces of characterizations. Snatches of dialog. In the end there were so many plot pieces left hanging & unexplained it I thought this episode might be half of a 2-parter. But as far as I can tell from IMDb this is a one-shot. So what's going on? A new mystery genre? You give viewers a few pieces of the puzzle & let them fill in the blanks? Come on, Tom, your fans & followers deserve a whole lot better. We know you can do it, that's why we keep coming back.

In my opinion, the story was underwritten, because considerable time was given over to the main character doing very routine things (presumably just to kill the film's allotted time). Context was a problem too. Unless people had watched every previous episode of the Jesse Stone collection, he or she would have a difficult time sorting out some of the characters and their motivations. The acting performances were pretty routine, with very occasional exceptions. The car dealer on the town council was more of a caricature that a character, in my opinion. A number of the conversations that occurred in the film were pretty much pointless, as they contributed nearly nothing to the story's development. I had the feeling that this movie was made solely to fill a TV time slot and that cinematic excellence wasn't even a consideration.

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.