The Little Things: Movie Review

Cast: Rami Malek, Denzel Washington, Jared Leto, Natalie Morales

Director: John Lee Hancock

The Little Things's desire to be a child of the 90s goes beyond just its setting.

The ethos of the film is very much a crime drama of the 1990s, with some big dramatic hitters assuming the major roles. But like the title says, it's the Little Things that help when the story gets either too muddled in its own mire, or too drawn out to be fully compelling.

While Hancock tries for tension, he doesn't quite make it stick as the 2 hours plays out, even though Washington, Malek and an underused Leto give their all.

Washington stars as Joe "Deke" Deacon, a deputy sheriff working on the fringes of Bakersfield, who's called into Los Angeles for a mundane job. Arriving in LA, Deacon finds himself drawn to the case of a missing girl that's being investigated by the department star Jim Baxter (Malek, in an exaggerated mannerisms role).

With time running out, and the bodies piling up, Deacon finds similarities between this latest case and an unsolved serial killer case he was investigating.... 

Aiming for dark and brooding, but occasionally dipping its toes into meandering, Washington anchors much of The Little Things' desire for flashbacks at pivotal turns and its penchant for jarring narrative turns that take you out of the moment.

Even though he's anguished and relatively dour, it's more that Washington feels a little less urgent in this role than in films like Kiss the Girls. But he remains watchable in the role, even if the script doesn't allow him the chance to expand much of his role as the cop haunted by one previous case.

The moments where the tension rises palpably does little to save the film, and a final gravel-pit based confrontation delivers echoes of Se7en's Brad Pitt's Mills desperately asking Kevin Spacey's John Doe "What's in the box?", but fires admirably hinting at what could have been in this old-cop-mentors-young-rookie-hotshot story.

But if Washington goes for dour through his paunchy physicality (and weirdly hints at the film's Deke being some kind of spiritual offshoot to The Equalizer), Leto's tendency to overplay his movements and exaggerate them leaves the potential villain of the piece as too much of a caricature, rather than a psychologically greyer one. 

The same can initially be said for Malek's hotshot detective who's majorly unlikeable in early appearances, and almost dismissive of the film he's in.

That's perhaps some of the problem of The Little Things - while it could have been a majorly effective psychologically haunting and morally questionable film, it dabbles too much in the procedural and fails to cohesively bring all the elements together. (And it's no film for women either, as they're victims or in Morales' case, afforded little other than supporting bit players).

Sure, it's the Little Things such as a haunting score and a brooding atmospheric shoot that help, but it's the bigger things that torpedo all of writer director John Lee Hancock's ambitions.