Jesse Stone

Jesse Stone is a former LAPD detective who moved across the country to Paradise, Massachusetts to be a small-town police chief.  Jesse is a divorcee and alcoholic.  These problems led him to leave California.

Stone Cold (2005): Police Chief Jesse Stone (Tom Selleck) is called to the beach.  Officer Simpson had been patrolling and spotted a dog sitting among the rocks.  When he went to check on the dog, he saw a dead man, presumably the dog's owner.  The man had two bullet holes in his chest.  He was not a citizen of Paradise.  The investigation has hardly begun than another person is found dead with two bullet holes.  Is this one shooter or possibly two?  Jesse collects license plates and interviews the vehicle owners.  One couple, a husband and wife, strike Jesse as peculiar and worthy of further investigation.  Meanwhile, a rape case has also landed in his lap.  The victim is a high schooler.  Jesse arrests one of the boys and soon finds himself accosted by attorney Rita Fiore (Mimi Rogers) who threatens legal consequences.  After that, she throws herself at Jesse but he declines the offer.  He already has a bedmate, Abby Taylor (Polly Shannon).  Lastly, there is the question of the dog.  Initially, Jesse adopts the dog while he looks for a better home.  Inevitably, the serial murder, the rape case, and the dog adoption converge in the climax.

Night Passage (2006): Jesse Stone stared out at the ocean with his dog at his side.  A police officer stopped to check on him and observed that he smelled alcohol.  Jesse admitted to being drunk but said he'd sober up before he drives.  Moreover, he revealed that he's a former cop.  Despite being the second movie, this predates Stone Cold.  Here we see Jesse drive cross country with his dog to interview for the job of chief in Paradise.  He is a bit surprise when he gets the job.  "I wouldn't have hired me," he confides to one of the police officers.  He has hardly begun the job than his predecessor - Chief Carson - is found murdered.  While getting to know the town, he starts up an affair with Abby Taylor the city attorney.  He is also propositioned by Cissy Hathaway, wife of one of the city councilmen, Hasty Hathaway (Saul Rubinek).  Of course, Cissy has had many affairs.  Among the issues that he must tackle are a spousal abuse case, the murder of Chief Carson, and establishing a rapport with his 3 police officers.  Interestingly, because this is a prequel, a character who died in Stone Cold is brought back.  Unexpected.

For some reason, Jesse finds women throwing themselves at him.  Sure, he's played by Tom Selleck, but some random drunkard in his 50s shouldn't be getting this much action.  His ex-wife calls him regularly though we never see her.  One gets the impression that he still loves her but is exasperated and exhausted by her.  But he doesn't want her to stop calling.  In general, Jesse is a sad fellow who rarely smiles and might be suffering depression.  This is not Magnum P. I.

I watched these on Amazon.  Just okay.  Selleck fans might enjoy it.  However, Bosch is better.

Quigley Down Under (1990)

Matthew Quigley (Tom Selleck) arrives in Freemantle, Australia in the 1870s.  He has hardly gotten off the ship than he gets into a brawl with a trio of men trying to load Crazy Cora (Laura San Giacomo) onto a wagon.  The fight is somewhat comical, and it turns out the three men were also there to escort Quigley to the Marston Ranch.  Elliott Marston (Alan Rickman) greets Quigley and demands a demonstration of his marksmanship.  Quigley impresses everyone with his accuracy.  Marston fancies himself as a quickdraw and demonstrates his skills on a pair of British deserters.  The two men retire to the main house for dinner where Marston explains his need of a marksman.  The aborigines are a real pain and vanish before his men can get in range.  Quigley reacts poorly and soon finds himself dragged into the desert to die, Crazy Cora at his side.  Instead, Quigley turns the tables on Marston's goons but is still left stranded in the desert.  Can Quigley survive the desert and exact revenge on Marston?

Though entertaining, there are some plot holes that grate.  When told that he was being hired to shoot Aborigines, he assaulted Marston.  How did he expect this to end?  How about his insistence on using his rifle?  The big reveal at the end when it turns out he is quite skilled with a revolver makes you wonder why he didn't make use of revolvers throughout once he was roped into this game of death?  Why is he a great marksman?  We are never told what he was shooting in the United States.  Was he a Civil War veteran?  Why doesn't the wanted poster feature a picture of Quigley?  Regarding Cora, what ship would sail from Galveston, Texas to Fremantle, Australia?  That is an interesting trade route.

Oddly enough, this reminded me of another moving from 1990: Dances with Wolves.  Kevin Costner is sent to the frontier during the Civil War and joins the Indians.  In this movie, Selleck finds himself allied with the Aborigines, though he doesn't go so far as to adopt their ways.

Definitely an entertaining movie.  Good popcorn fun.

Runaway (1984)

In the near future, Jack Ramsay (Tom Selleck) is a police officer who serves in a special unit that responds to malfunctioning robots.  Robots are common, providing office security, agricultural service, home care, and restaurant staff.  On this particular day, he has a new partner.  Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes) is eager to learn the ropes.  There is immediately a call about a malfunctioning agricultural robot.  As they fly to the scene, they can see the maze-like pattern the defective robot has carved in the cornfield.  The chase is mostly comedic but gives an idea of what the job entails.  However, right out the gate, it is unclear why this is a police matter rather than a technical support issue.  Later robots prove to be more dangerous, even deadly.  Ramsay and Thompson soon discover that someone is sabotaging robots by inserting a chip on the motherboard.  The villain proves to be Dr. Charles Luther (Gene Simmons).  Not only can he sabotage robots, he has a rocket pistol with heat-seeking bullets that can differentiate heat signatures.  Can Jack and Karen stop Luther before he sells his killer chips to a terrorist?

Watching the movie today, some of the technology looks primitive.  However, much of what is shown did not exist at the time.  I didn't blink at the wireless headsets, signs of the internet, voice-activated computers, and camera drones.  The one cellphone that did appear was the large brick with a stubby antenna that was high-tech in the late 80s to early 90s.  The robots are all primitive, mostly rolling boxes with an extending arm or two.

Jack is a single father, which figures into the film when Luther targets his son, Bobby.  Karen is almost immediately smitten by him; he is Tom Selleck, after all.  She often seems more love-interest than partner.  Oddly, Jack is rather dense about her attraction to him and instead has eyes for Jackie Rogers (Kirstie Alley).  In fact, he does the stupid male bravado bit to rescue her from a security robot, getting repeatedly shocked in the process.  That diminished my view of him as an expert on dealing with robots.  You just beat them with a chair.  Right.

The Chief of Police is played by GW Bailey of all people.  Earlier in 1984, he had stared in the first Police Academy movie as the comically villainous Lt. Harris.  He reprised that role 6 times in the next 10 years.  As such, it was hard not to laugh when he would chew out Ramsay.  

Gene Simmons just glowers through the movie.  He is pure hostility.  He betrays everyone and has no hesitation in killing whoever gets in his way.  One wonders why anyone made deals with this obviously untrustworthy thug.

Both written and directed by Michael Crichton, it is much like one of his books.  The characters are mostly two-dimensional while the villain is one-dimensional, but the setting is amazingly well-developed.

Good popcorn fun.

High Road to China (1983)

Eve Tozer (Bess Armstrong) is a daughter of a wealthy industrialist.  She is a spendthrift party girl, a flapper with bobbed hair and scandalously short skirt.  Then disaster strikes.  Word is that her long absent father is going to be declared legally dead and the company - the source of her money - will belong to the surviving partner, Mr. Bentik (Robert Morley).  She has 12 days to get her father to a British Court to avert poverty!  Worse still, Bentik has sent men to prevent her from trying.  Last she heard, her father was in Waziristan; she'll need a plane.

Patrick O'Malley (Tom Selleck) is an American flying ace who owns a couple of planes.  Exactly how he has the planes in Istanbul while also being penniless is not explored.  Nonetheless, he refuses Eve's multiple generous offers to hire him.  He finally relents when she offers 100,000 pounds.  They depart for the east under gunfire from Bentik's goons though O'Malley thinks its a jealous husband seeking revenge; apparently he's a womanizer?  All evidence is to the contrary for the remainder of the film.

Selleck and Armstrong mostly yell at each other.  Sure, we all know they will love one another by the end but it is rather sudden.  The chemistry was weak.  Of course, the characters were not well written.  Why did Eve decide that she should take the plane and do a bombing run of the Chinese soldiers?  To save her father, who had things well under control?  O'Malley is introduced as a drunken womanizer but, little more than a week later, he is sober and falling for Eve.

When they track down her father (Wilford Brimley) on the far side of the Himalayas, he explains that Eve's wealth is in no danger.  All the patents are in his name.  Gee, if only that fancy London lawyer had known that, this whole trip could have been avoided.  On another subject, why is this portly industrialist building bombs for Chinese peasants?  It would have been nice to get an adequate backstory for Bradley Tozer's wanderings.

Though weak in retrospect, it was enjoyable to watch.  May have to get the book to find out what really happened.