January is not a month known for its good movies. Sure, you may get some awards bait thing that, due to where you live, didn’t come out in December in your neck of the woods, but a movie that comes out in January is not something the studio probably has much faith in. Sometimes a good one will sneak in here or there, but by and large, it’s just something some studio tossed off to maybe sell some tickets and then forget about.
Then again, we’re still in pandemic times, so maybe there’s hope for something like The Little Things, a movie with three Oscar-winning actors, so there might be something there.
Set for some reason in 1990 (probably because writer/director John Lee Hancock first wrote the script in 1993), the movie follows the investigation of a serial killer in the Los Angeles area. Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington) is a Deputy Sheriff in a rural California county headed into the city for what should be a quick pick-up. He used to be a detective there, and he catches the eye of up-and-coming detective Jim Baxter (Rumi Malek). Baxter is trying to catch a serial killer, and while he doesn’t know exactly why Deke quit and transferred to a much more quiet part of the state, he could use the help and asks for some pointers. Deke agrees to help him on the side, showing the younger man the ropes and how to look out for the “little things” that can make or break a case. Eventually, the pair find a suspect in the form of creepy mechanic Albert Sparma (Jared Leto), but the actual evidence that Sparma did anything more than monitor the local police band and know a lot about the case is somewhat hard to find, especially as yet another victim disappears. Can the cops nail the killer?
OK, questions like that are obvious. Yes, the two detectives will close the case. The question for movies like this is usually “how?” not “can they?” As such, we’d need Hancock to deliver something especially tight or stylish to make it worth the audience’s while. He does have three talented actors in the main roles, and all three have a fair amount of onscreen charisma. However, charisma alone won’t necessarily sink or swim a movie like this. I think this is a bit where Hancock goes wrong. The opening sequence, showing a young woman driving along a lonesome road before another car appears, follows her, and she eventually hides around a gas station before she can flag down a tractor trailer to save her from the mysterious man whose face we never see is fairly tight until I asked myself why this woman thought she was in danger in the first place. And that more or less sums up my experience with The Little Things.
That extends a bit to the performances. I always enjoy seeing Washington onscreen, and this was no real exception. He plays the wise mentor figure well, even when he’s on the wrong side of things like he was in Training Day. He could play Deke in his sleep. Same with Leto as a creepy weirdo because, well, Leto is something of a weirdo who can sometimes be creepy. Malek’s role is the most generic of the bunch, but again, not much for any of these actors to really stretch their acting chops with. I more or less decided the movie was running entirely on Washington’s charms alone, and that isn’t enough.
It likewise didn’t help that the movie in many ways reminded me of a cheaper version of another 90s era serial killer movie. I won’t say which one because simply doing so would actually give a few things away about how this movie turns out. There are a couple nice twists in the final minutes, but the movie just doesn’t do much for me. In a normal January where I’d be hitting the multiplex every week, this would be a nice thing to see. In a pandemic January when I am filling holes on classic movies I’ve never seen before, it just comes across as more “meh” than I had thought it would be. It’s not bad, but it’s nothing special either.
Grade: C+
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