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The Little Things

2/10/2021

3 Comments

 

TBD

A disgraced detective returns to the big city to solve a series of murders.

Directed by John Lee Hancock
Starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto
​Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
Denzel Washington is such a great actor that the Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period podcast could credibly exist for years.  I listened to almost every episode and the hosts never allowed for the possibility that there was an alternative to their podcast title.  However, Washington hasn’t been in a great movie since the mid-2000’s depending on if one is an American Gangster, Man on Fire, or Inside Man partisan, and the greatest director he’s worked with in the last fifteen years is probably himself.  He’s gone down the old-man action path far more than the prestige path.  Washington’s an actor of instant name recognition who can seemingly do whatever he wants and he wants to remake the Magnificent Seven.  His latest, The Little Things, is another odd choice.  I doubt Washington wanted to fulfill a career goal by working with the director of The Blind Side, John Lee Hancock.  The Little Things’ triple-Oscar winner main cast does nothing to elevate a script that offers essentially nothing to the serial killer genre, including Washington who’s in paycheck mode.  Add the lackluster presence of Rami Malek and the terminally off-putting Jared Leto, and this is a film whose existence is completely unnecessary.

In its opening scene, The Little Things evokes unflattering comparisons that it has no chance of living up to.  A woman driving alone on a dark highway is belting out a pop ballad, as Catherine Martin so famously did in Silence of the Lambs.  The heavy use of shadows and headlights also calls to mind Zodiac’s opening scene, so two titans of the genre are paid homage to/ripped off in the first minute, and that’s not accounting for the Seven vibe that’s all over the final act.  Hancock first wrote this script shortly after Silence of the Lambs dominated the critical and cultural landscape.  It might’ve seemed fresh if he got it made sooner, but 30 years later, Silence of the Lambs has been replicated so many times that there’s very little left to say about serial killers that dozens of movies and TV shows haven’t already gone over, to say nothing of the gross trend of true crime swallowing up every medium.  Fine, homicide detectives have deadening jobs.  Humans do terrible things to each other, and the pursuit of justice can easily slide into obsession.  Hancock has nowhere near the vision or the inspiration to breathe new life into this subject.
​
Moving through this tired universe is Washington as disgraced cop Deke Deacon, a former LA murder detective now living in a California desert shack as a deputy.  On an errand to his old department, he gets drawn into a series of murders that haven’t turned up any leads under detective Jim Baxter’s (Malek) direction.  Because Deke is one of those cops who can cut through plot tangles with his preternatural perception and evidence walls, Leto’s Albert Sparma becomes the investigation’s new target.  Deke infects Baxter with his brand of obsession, and the latter finds himself neglecting his family and his other work to trail Sparma, a greaseball who sure walks, talks, and acts like a serial killer.  Deke and Baxter talk about god and look at ominous crosses on hills, while Hancock’s attempt to visualize Deke’s guilt over his failures means nothing less than that the actual women Deke’s failed to save follow him around in a recreation of Vincent Hanna’s nightmare from Heat.

The Little Things makes a move towards redemption in its final scenes as it’s revealed that our protagonist has been a corrupt and murderous cop the whole time, and his sins aren’t ones of omission but of commission.  It’s the kind of reversal that I might admire in a better film, but everything is played in such a muted, dead register that any rooting interest has long since withered into nothing.  A lot of that ineffectiveness is how rote and unsurprising and uninspired the film is up to the reveal, and another chunk is Leto’s presence as an actor who is always acting in the most ostentatious way possible.  His Sparma is never anything but Leto as an eccentric weirdo.  There’s no way he had a limp in the script: Leto probably just thought he should have more physical business.  As written, the character is a complete red herring who likes to antagonize cops, and then in steps Leto with his meth face and his fake paunch to all but break the film when he shows up.  His death, caused by Baxter in a burst of rage, evoked exactly nothing, not for the character’s absence nor for the guilt that Baxter would now have to live with.

The Little Things is a movie that exists, and that’s about all I can say for it.  It’s not actively offensive at least, though it is mildly so with all the shots of naked female corpses.  It’s hard not to find the behind-the-scenes blocking of a female corpse unsettling, like Hancock’s asked the actor to lie there in pallid makeup as he gets her breasts in frame while people talk around her.  Even the always welcome presence of Michael Hyatt as the morgue worker can’t keep these scenes from feeling gross.  Washington is reasonably watchable even at low energy and the ending is subversive, but subversive for miniscule effect.  The Little Things needed to stay in the mid-90’s, or at least attach a director who can bring more than other people’s work to the table.  C-
3 Comments
ShaneS
2/10/2021 10:03:06 pm

The first 90 minutes, which were average cliche at best, we're we're rendered absolutely pointless by the unearned final plot twist.

Reply
Lane
2/27/2021 11:43:53 am

Although crime procedurals are a staple of one’s local book store and podcast feeds, and shows like “NCIS” and its many locale iterations continue to hog ratings on prime time television, the genre has been underrepresented in theaters of late. I blame David Fincher, whose virtuosity in the genre makes even competent attempts look like dreck. So, kudos to John Lee Hancock for giving it a go with “The Little Things.” He doesn’t quite pull it off, but the effort should be recognized.

In the wake of the Fincher-esque revolution, there are really only three ways to make your crime-procedural film a standout these days. First, you can take a Tarantino route and shock and awe your audience with violence, language, or sex; you can take the Scorecese approach and play with genre, turning otherwise pedestrian cops-and-robbers dramas into tragi-comic Greek tragedies; or you come up with an ending so mind-bendingly awesome that people can’t help but tell friends and neighbors that they have to see it to believe it. Hancock only gives proficient half-measures to these tactics and so “The Little Things” comes out as an interesting way to spend two hours but not a thrilling one. The beats of this drama are all familiar, even comforting for fans of the genre like myself. But it’s likely the film will not have much staying power. I foresee trivia questions about the one time two generational acting talents—one on his way up and one hitting the early twilight of his career—met up for a February release in a pandemic. I’ll probably forget the answer, to be honest.

What Hancock attempts to do in “The Little Things” is re-boot the gritty crime films of what I suspect was his youth. The noir vibe is strong. Characters have names like “Deke” and “Sal” and “Jimmy,” which one suspects are names not used much in LA these days. Malik’s performance is strong though his character’s Colonel Kurtz style decent into madness towards the end doesn’t quite convince. Jared Leto was probably just told to “be weird,” which doesn’t seem like much acting would be required for him. There are homages a plenty—Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” gets a Los Angeles update as the three acting leads drive through the Canyons of Southern California at night. The scene is even complete with out-of-sync backgrounds in Deke’s rear car window, a detail that would be cheesy if I didn’t think it was intentional. LA’s less desirable neighborhoods get the star treatment in all their glorious grime. It doesn’t quite set the mood like Fincher’s rainy Gotham in “Seven,” but the derelict buildings of murder-LA offer a nice contrast to the seemingly safe suburban Hollywood hills.

And let me say something about the cars. The use of vehicles in this film is creative, yet exemplifies many of the. films problems. The use of 70s era muscle cars and gas-guzzling sedans would be a nice touch if a bit more understated. Sparma’s Nova is right on brand. Maybe add in that Deke drives an Impala, or something, signaling his continuity with Gene Hackman or Walter Matthau or some other “Dirty Harry” era cop who’s just waiting for a criminal to make his day. Play his character off Malik’s “college boy” and you’d have an interesting contrast. But instead, Hancock replaced all the film’s cars with period piece autos while leaving the rest of the aesthetic untouched, so much so that one can’t really place the time of the film at all. Malik wears one-inch-lapel skinny suits and Deke drops into an old watering hold converted into a gentrified hipster bar, which all suggests this could have happened yesterday, but everyone seems to have inherited their grandpas high-mileage block engine hoopty which, of course, he only ever had to change the oil and tires on. Kids don’t care for things like they used to. This is a detail, but as the film constantly reminds us, it’s the little things that count the most, and too many of the little things just don’t add up in this film.

The film’s saving grace is Denzel Washington. This role won’t even be in his top 50 best performances, and yet without his brooding one could see the whole thing quickly falling apart. This is probably Denzel giving about half-effort, and he doesn’t shine in every scene. Yet even this pay day performance shows the talent gap that rising stars like Malik still have to make up. The film’s one spark of on-screen chemistry finally comes when Deke confronts Sparma in the interview room and two interesting acting talents get to shine. Alas, the scene is only about a minute, and mostly leaves one wishing for more of that.

No spoilers here, but for those waiting for the big twist at the end, well…twist might

Reply
Lane
2/27/2021 11:46:43 am

No spoilers here, but for those waiting for the big twist at the end, well…twist might not be the right word. The ending is interesting in the same way Diet Coke is filling (and I like Diet Coke). One gets the feeling that had not Washington and Malik headlined, this film might not have ever made it out of pandemic purgatory. But good on Hancock for trying. Here’s hoping it might spark some other A-listers to give the genre a try. Lord knows it’s ready for a re-boot. “The Little Things” just isn’t quite it.

Grade: B

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