For cinephiles familiar with the film-distribution phenomenon known as “dump month,” expectations concerning The Little Things were decidedly mixed. Yes, the new movie from writer-director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) starred the award-caliber actors Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto. And yes, it promised to be the rare made-for-adults feature that eschewed pre-sold intellectual property in favor of original storytelling. Yet the fact of its January release date, assigned before COVID-19 altered studio calendars, simply couldn’t be ignored. Since the cutoff for Academy Award eligibility traditionally falls on Dec. 31, wasn’t the scheduling decision by Warner Bros. a tacit admission that its prestige vehicle secretly stunk?
Having now watched Hancock’s latest, I am pleased to report that it is not a bad movie so much as half of a decent one: a picture that clears its throat for an hour but ultimately manages to shout. Available at home due to its studio’s harebrained straight-to-HBO Max scheme, The Little Things is nevertheless worth a trip to the theater in municipalities that still permit such excursions. Indeed, one could argue that the film is of a type most obviously enhanced by the theatrical experience. Star-powered, sporadically tense, and instantly forgettable, it practically cries out for a darkened auditorium and a king-size bucket of popcorn.
Like a dozen police movies before it, The Little Things pairs detectives at opposite ends of their careers. Jimmy Baxter (Malek) is an up-and-comer in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the lead investigator on a gruesome murder case. Joe Deacon (Washington) once worked a similar crime and suspects that a serial killer is on the prowl. A study in timeworn contrasts — Baxter is hotheaded, Deacon is meticulous and wise — the duo follows clues to Albert Sparma (Leto), an appliance repairman who may have had contact with the most recent victim. Convinced of Sparma’s guilt by his proximity to the case and ghoulish affect, Baxter and Deacon begin a pursuit that will test their understanding of what it means to achieve justice.
If all of this sounds somewhat familiar, it is because Hancock has fashioned a movie that owes no small debt to David Fincher’s Seven, the lurid 1995 thriller starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. So similar are the two films, in fact, that a full accounting of their resemblances opens Hancock not only to the charge of excessive borrowing but to allegations of outright theft. Like Seven, The Little Things sees in its two leads the contrast between innocence and experience and spends its run time dismantling its younger protagonist’s moral certainties. Like Fincher’s movie, Hancock’s uses one detective’s family to characterize both men. In each picture, an otherworldly villain injects a subcurrent of enigmatic menace into the proceedings. And both films raise the specter that harm will befall the loved ones to whom audiences have been so carefully introduced.
Alas, comparability is no guarantee of quality, and The Little Things falls short of its predecessor in nearly every way. A reliable screen presence for the past three decades, Washington is believably weary as a lawman on his last legs, but he conjures little of the soulfulness that Freeman brought to an analogous role. With his sallow face and mouth-full-of-cotton intonation, Malek is too unintentionally weird to anchor a serious movie, and he might have been better used in the part that went to the scenery-chewing Leto. Watching Malek at work, I was reminded of the career arc of Kevin Spacey, another Seven veteran who provided that film with its most enthralling scenes. Like Malek, Spacey parlayed an Oscar win (for American Beauty) into a brief stint as a traditional leading man, a decision that led to the unwatchable travesty Pay It Forward. Though Malek would do well to avoid a great many of the older actor’s choices, the central career lesson may be to accept only those parts that fit.
Casting missteps aside, The Little Things flounders at times because of the looseness of its editing and writing, two elements of filmmaking that couldn’t be more crucial for a moody procedural. Where the former is concerned, the problem is modest but noticeable, as when one character drinks a beer that has appeared from nowhere or another seems to be in two rooms at once. More critical, however, is the general blandness of the movie’s script, which plods along for nearly an hour before picking up with the appearance of Leto’s eerie repairman. As previously hinted, Leto’s performance is not particularly good. Nevertheless, his entrance marks the conclusion of the film’s long preamble and the commencement of its actual plot.
Where that narrative ends up going ought not to be spoiled, of course, so suffice it to say that The Little Things is less concerned with practical guilt or innocence than any police drama in recent memory. To an extent, this is disappointing: We are, after all, watching a movie about an unsolved crime. Yet waiting in the film’s final act is a plot turn just interesting enough to justify the omission. Whether it is sufficient to redeem the project is a question for each viewer.
Occasionally intriguing but unmistakably flawed, The Little Things has all the hallmarks of the minor cinematic event that it is. Given the present state of the movie industry, that may be enough to deem it a success.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
