“The Little Things,” a blunt-edged new serial killer mystery from John Lee Hancock, would seem to break the subgenre’s one big rule: We meet our big baddie before reaching the halfway point, without much doubt in our mind as to his guilt (why hire history’s most wily and unpredictable Joker, a wide-eyed and nervy Jared Leto, to play him otherwise?). But wait, you might say, doesn’t even Fritz Lang’s “M” – the godfather of serial killer dramas – reveal its killer in the first act? So it does. But that film probes complicated psychological depths to a degree of emotional complexity that audiences in 1931 hadn’t yet come to expect from the movies. “The Little Things,” meanwhile, can barely see past all the archetypes it borrows from 90 years of genre evolution.
Admittedly unfair comparisons aside, “The Little Things” is also a classic old blood/new blood story coursing through clogged narrative arteries, enlisting a great Denzel Washington as venerable ex-investigator Joe Deacon and a robotic Rami Malek as Jim Baxter, the down-to-business young cop who has been successful up to this point in keeping the ugliness of the occupation out of his cozy home life. Joe hasn’t been as lucky; divorced and on his own, he’s psychologically worn down by a series of past slayings, the culprit of which remains free. But something else about that history keeps peeling the scab open afresh, and as much as “The Little Things” is about us watching Joe and Jim following a killer’s breadcrumb trail, it also fashions us into detectives trying to piece together Joe’s past.
The story is a bleak one – cataclysm doesn’t loom upon the film’s LA so much as it’s already settled over the city, and bodies of dead women are picked over in crime scenes, forensics labs and at the foot of Joe’s fragile psyche – although for how committed Hancock is to a familiar aesthetic, his wobbly screenplay makes ascertaining which dark corner of the story we should be most squinting our eyes to illuminate a tiresome and mostly dull affair. “We got something—we just don’t know what it is,” Joe says not 15 minutes into the movie but 15 minutes from the end, and it’s uncanny to hear a movie provide so direct a confession about its own existence.
Having spent most of his career dabbling in the histories of American institutions with varying shades of moral grey, Hancock’s first work of total make-believe since his 1991 debut, “Hard Time Romance,” dives fully into the darkness of a California community under siege by an ambiguous evil as boys in blue trip over moral boundaries on the bumpy road to justice. Suffice to say, with Thomas Newman’s teasingly tense piano keys and neighborhood streets awash in shadows and decaying greens, “The Little Things” is an eager enrollee in the David Fincher School of Creepy Killers and Helpless Cops—this is easily Hancock’s grittiest work, a fanged snarl to the pearly-white smirk of “The Founder” or “Saving Mr. Banks.” But at a point when we’ve spent years eagerly dissecting what about Fincher’s “Zodiac” and Bong Joon-ho’s thematically comparative “Memories of Murder” still lodges our heart in our throats, “The Little Things” merely feels like it’s copying someone else’s homework without taking care to understand the formula. It lacks clarity as a procedural, is missing urgency as a character study, and the timing of a final bruising revelation feels like the movie sidestepping the entanglements of human complexity when it would’ve been more memorable to wade directly into the thorny thicket. The abyss is easy to stare into here, because the abyss itself is rather cross-eyed.
To its credit, “The Little Things” at least intermittently seems to understand it’s only as good as how much Joe takes the stage. In his first movie since the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott’s ranking of the current century’s greatest actors ignited the pyres of online discourse, an act by which Washington’s No. 1 placement didn’t serve as the gasoline so much as a healthy bundle of dry hay, the veteran makes good on Dargis’s observation that he “can express anguished vulnerability, but he can tower like a colossus.” He certainly does more of the former here, but Hancock’s movie is at its most magnetic as Joe becomes increasingly volatile in his efforts to take a colossus’s swing at a past that keeps bursting its way through the frozen horrors of the present. That’s to say, Denzel is reliably Denzel—able to communicate more of Joe’s enduring torment through a sullen stony gaze and twitchy grin than a monologue ever could...which is handy, because Hancock’s writing (he’s working from his own screenplay for the first time since 2009’s “The Blind Side”) becomes overwrought when it attempts to reach deeper than his overly familiar setup allows.
Washington has won two acting Oscars over the course of a storied career, while Malek and Leto have each snagged a statuette of their own in recent years. It’s easy to picture the Warner Bros. powers that be crossing their fingers that all that Academy gold lures viewers in for the first of the company’s simultaneous theatrical/HBO Max launches of the year on Friday, so it’s ironic that the film instead makes a good case for why all Academy Awards victories aren’t created equal. I’ll leave the ever-shifting Academy politics to Twitter and awards season podcasts, and instead suggest that “The Little Things” provides a strong case for why there is no worse thing for a mediocre actor than being paired up with greatness—which is perhaps why it’s easier to buy into the horror when Washington and Malek are finding their individual routes through a meandering story and faltering hopes. (Leto, meanwhile, isn’t allowed the wherewithal by the screenplay for his playfulness to coalesce into something creepier.) Hancock’s movie becomes a test of wills in more ways than one, yet it’s ours that has undergone the most strain once the credits start to roll.
"The Little Things" is rated R for violent/disturbing images, language and full nudity. It's available in theaters and on HBO Max starting Friday.
Staring: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto, Chris Bauer
Directed by John Lee Hancock
2021
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