The Little Things: Throwback Cop Drama Has Ample Star Power, Little Logic or Originality

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

The neo-noir police procedural The Little Things, written and directed by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, The Founder), stars three Oscar best actor winners: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto. It’s a narrative familiar enough to serve as a nightmare nursery tale — an aging, morally burdened cop and a young hotshot encounter a criminal of evil that shatters their sense of the moral order of things.

If you caught the David Fincher-produced series Mindhunter (2017-2019), you saw that encounter reiterated through two television seasons.

Hancock can hardly be accused of copying. The Little Things is based on a script he wrote 30 years ago that was shopped around to Clint Eastwood and Danny DeVito back in the 1990s. To a point, there’s a pleasure in revisiting this world with big-budget production values with shadowy textured cinematography from John Schwartzman (Seabiscuit) and the flesh-prickling score from Thomas Newman.

There’s almost a sense of homecoming to those blue-grey precinct offices, red-light hotel rooms, muffin-brown shabby apartments, and occasional moody stretches of drives through California urban sprawl.

Washington plays Joe “Deke” Deacon, who was once a Los Angeles star detective, now a Kern County (Bakersfield) sheriff’s deputy, who’s sent down to Los Angeles to retrieve a piece of evidence from the LAPD homicide department, with an ulterior motive of looking into a case with familiar elements.

Instead of returning home, he uses his vacation time and ends up staying in the city in a fleabag hotel, trying to make himself useful. He ends up pairing with the hotshot, college-trained detective Jimmy Baxter (Malek) in an investigation that leads them (minor spoiler) to the creepy chief suspect, Albert Sparma, played by Leto.

Deke left the Los Angeles homicide squad five years earlier under something of a cloud, known for an obsessiveness that led him to a divorce and heart attack. Baxter, ignoring a caution not to get mixed up with Deke, has heard of Deke’s legendary reputation as a closer of tough cases.

He invites Deke along to a murder scene, the latest case in a series of a half-dozen similar unsolved murders of young women. Deke emphasizes the importance of “the little things,” the details of a crime scene that can break a case or an accumulation of regrets and doubts that can drive a cop crazy.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Deke’s attention to detail lead to an appliance repair shop, and one of its contract employees, Sparma, seems like a good suspect. He’s a crime buff who, whether guilty or not, clearly relishes taunting the police, and luring Baxter into the same dark path that Deke went before.

Estimable as the cast is, the actors aren’t always well-served by the material here. Washington offers a typically shrewd performance, though his confident presence is weakened by awkward subjective flashbacks, where he talks to corpses or envisions crime victims. Malek, who plays oddly elfin characters so well (Bohemian Rhapsody, Mr. Robot) never seems entirely comfortable in his suit-and-tie, young dad role, though he holds it together.

Then, in the movie’s second half, when Leto enters, the movie goes decidedly sideways. Leto’s character is a crime-obsessed working-class refrigerator repairman who plays intellectual cat-and-mouse with the cops, in a performance that has more than a whiff of class condescension.

He looks like an old-school hippie, with a shuffling gait and a slight pot belly on his skinny frame, which makes you think that, at the very least, they might book him for his fashion crimes.

Apparently, he does get under Baxter’s starched collar, because in the lead-up to the movie’s climactic night scene in the desert, the supposedly savvy detective makes a series of preposterous decisions that no cop or sober civilian in their right mind would make.

As the story circles back to the moral burden that Deke bears, the matter turns out to be more mundane than the movie makes it out to be. We go to genre films as much for familiarity as originality, and the problem with The Little Things is that the proportions feel wrong.

To quote an old diss, usually misaccredited to Samuel Johnson, the parts of The Little Things that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good.

The Little Things. Directed and written by John Lee Hancock. Starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto. Available in selected theatres and through video on demand beginning January 29.