So boring!!!

Yes. Read some of my other posts.

To me, the script was just cut and pasted from other Jesse Stones. It's bad enough when a series or franchise has a formula, but even worse when that formula is a bore!

I am a big Tom Selleck fan, but this is a dog! The scenery is great and it would be great if it was more like Spenser: For Hire, after all it uses enough characters from Spenser.

Fred

Some people call it relaxing. Like when you find drinking five cups of coffee has you gritting your teeth.

I like the show for the visuals, the dialog, character development. In this episode it seems Stone is making progress in his life. Admitting his dislike/respect for his replacement. Trying to open up to his dog that here fused to 'own'...

Though it is muted, there is change.

The repetitive element stems from the books. Which the movie encourages one to read.

Agreed.

I thought the story was okay, but the writing was horrendous throughout. The entirety of every scene was written in a "Who's on first?" style, with repeated dialog and words used at the start and end of each scene. Tiring.

Worse, it has the worst sort of writer's affliction, where everyone speaks as the main character does. Someone says, "You've always liked this town.", and he says,
"I do." That was set up in all the Stone movies as a Stone thing, but in this one, all the women do it, too. People don't talk like that.

The precious little action this had was poorly executed and nonsensical. On the abandoned ship, the man is waiting for Stone to come through the door so he can shoot him. You can NOT sit and wait to shoot someone in a narrow doorway with a long rifle at 20 feet and miss that shot. Then he missed that shot.

The way he missed him with the sniper scope a minute before was idiotic, too. He tipped his head down to sip coffee and the sniper shot missed him by a foot. You don't aim for the toupee, you aim for center of mass and blow the heart through the fence.

This wasn't terrible, but the worst Jesse Stone movie by a good measure.

Yes, the series has been getting worse and worse and these last two are the very worst, with this 2012 one being the worst of all. Tom Selleck should stick to acting, not writing. The crime writers should do the writing.
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The entire series is very slow(-paced), unusually so, but it fits the characters, setting and content well. For one, it reflects the pace of life in a place like Paradise. There's also a bit of a zen/taoist-type simple elegance to the dialogue which fits and helps build the series' unique aesthetic.

It is important going into any of the films to not only not expect something action-packed, but to not expect anything like a standard police procedural or crime film, either. The Jesse Stone films are far more about the characters, and about that quiet, melancholic elegance.

In some respects, the series is more like a soap opera as well. Heck, in at least half of the films--and arguably in all of them--the criminal/police procedural and "thriller" stuff functions far more like an afterthought, but at least in the films, that's very much on purpose. Being police (well and criminals for a couple of them) is what the lead characters happen to do; it's not really the focus of the stories.

There seems to be less and less action in the Jesse Stone movies as the series progress. But I found this one OK. It was the first hour of 'Innocents Lost' that I found such a hard slog.