Three Oscar winners in one movie—Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto—and yet the fireworks never explode in a serial killer murder mystery with shades of many other like-minded stories that audiences have seen and loved before.
The Little Things doesn’t pay attention to its moniker as it is those little things, spread across the cinematic experience of the film, that fail to come together and weave a mystery that leaves us with more questions than answers.
Hey, I adore a film that floats in the elusive department that allows the viewer to come to their own conclusions. It’s just in director John Lee Hancock’s detective drama, the pieces of the puzzles are there and just simply fail to come together in a coherent and emotionally weighted way.
At its heart, the premise of The Little Things sounds awfully familiar, yet it still tries to carve its own path. Washington is a former LAPD detective who left town for a smaller police job in a more rural town up North. He teams up with a relatively new detective (Malek) in search of a killer that is leaving female bodies all over the City of Angels. Some have compared it to Se7en, but other than it’s veteran/grizzled detective and newbie detective on the trail of a serial killer, that is about where the connection ends. Where the David Fincher movie was gritty, tragic, and even had its moments of levity, Hancock’s is devoid of any of those—even though the streets of Los Angeles can be pretty easily painted as filled with grit.
Then, there’s Jared Leto’s Albert Sparma. From the outset, he appears to be almost too spot-on to be “the guy.” He’s got straggly, unwashed long hair is creepy as all get-up, and seems to have fun taunting the police. What’s wild about his performance is that although Washington has recently been declared the finest actor in the world (we agree), he seems to play Denzel as a cop in this film and Malek is a cardboard cut-out of a robotic police officer hell-bent on solving his crime to prove to his boss he belongs in this echelon of the department. Leto is the bright spot. Whereas in Suicide Squad he was the weak link, here he is the one who seems to be holding the entire thing together. He’s haunting, sure, but there is something about him that makes you wonder whether he is a serial killer. Looks aren’t everything, and for that matter in the cinema, actions aren’t either in this milieu.
There’s a whole lot of misdirection here with Hancock’s script (he wrote and directed) meant to keep the audience guessing. In fact, it does the opposite. It’s rare when watching a film that watches get checked. But, that is exactly what happened on repeated occasions with The Little Things. As the bodies pile up and connections are made to previous murders, thus linking our killer to a wide swath of death and lives destroyed, the suspense level should exponentially elevate. It doesn’t.
The tone of this tome remains the same throughout. There are no ebbs and flows, simply a steady stream of murder and mystery being cracked by a duo who seemed to have teamed up out of necessity and not even a remote amount of character chemistry. It is a shame, because there are lives being lost here as the film progresses and there is no connection between the audience and those who have perished on the screen.
Usually, that is embodied by the detectives investigating the murders, spurred by a cocktail of rage and justice that adds up to an emotive tether with the viewer that results in the thrills and the joys of capturing the “bastard who did this.” There is none of this here and although the actors are all Oscar winners, they each turn in varied versions of something that is not what the screenwriter penned on the page—or maybe they did and that is also the problem.
Washington is somewhat compelling, and one can feel his angst over an old case that riddles him with guilt and regret and is exactly why he left the confines of the LAPD for a smaller municipality up north. We meet the ex-wife that he lost over what happened in LA and what spurred his move. Yet it delivers little in terms of a deeper understanding of who is this crippled by failure cop.
Don’t get me wrong, watching Washington read the dictionary can be a thrill. It is just that in The Little Things, the dictionary here—i.e., the script—doesn’t give the esteemed actor too much to work with. In the past he has elevated material in an almost magical and magnificent way. Here, there is almost none of that and instead we get a run of the mill serial killer film with three Oscar winning actors not turning in Oscar worthy work.
Malek… what can be said about what the Bohemian Rhapsody star turns in. It seems like he is stuck in that Bond villain role (soon to be seen in No Time to Die) that is hardened without a hard shell. He is robotic, without the basic physiological movements of such an entity and a line delivery that is as shallow and vapid as the Los Angeles River during a drought. Malek is a true talent, that cannot be denied. But from the moment he shows up on the scene in The Little Things, one wonders what on earth he is doing and what movie he thinks he is starring in.
It pains to write this because after what he did portraying Freddie Mercury and what we can discern from the No Time to Die trailer, this is a true talent.
Much of the fault has to lie at the feet of Hancock. The man who gave us The Blind Side and Saving Mr. Banks may not be the right person for this job. Sure, he penned the script, so this is his baby. But so much of what fails The Little Things are exactly that—the little things, who all add up to something akin to a cinematic waste of time.
The Little Things is in theaters this Friday, January 29, and simultaneously will debut on HBOMax.
Grade: C-