There are two film genres I’ve bounced off of going back to when I was a kid, when my parents would rent movies at Blockbuster each weekend: lavish costume dramas and crime thrillers. 90’s era crime thrillers to be specific. You know the one’s, the kind of movie that hit its popular apex with The Silence of the Lambs, followed by a boatload of bad knockoffs until David Fincher refined and eventually perfected the genre with Se7en and Zodiac.
John Lee Hancock‘s The Little Things is very much that latter breed, the sort of film that I would half pay attention to, that often stars Denzel Washington, and has some bad twist or an ending aiming at some level of profundity. In a genre ridden with cliches, crime thrillers are an outright fossil and have to really bring something fresh to the table to stand out. Unsurprisingly, for a filmmaker like Hancock, who has made his bread and butter in “films for the heartland” like The Blind Side and Saving Mr. Banks, his attempt at stretching his filmmaking chops is dusting off a script he wrote back in the early 90’s and getting it in front of a camera. And apparently he decided to touch it up on no way shape or form – hell, it even still takes place in 1990! It’s now a period piece!
Surprise, surprise: this one also stars Denzel, but now that he’s entered his autumn years, he’s now cast as the weathered and beaten down ex-hotshot detective who is pulling a patrol beat in a quiet California county. Wouldn’t you know it, he’s still haunted by the mistakes of his past and the serial killer that got away back when he was working the mean streets of LA. Circumstance finds him back there, doing some courtroom work, when he crosses paths with the new star of the LAPD’s homicide division (played by a painfully miscast Rami Malek). They butt heads, then they find common ground. The younger detective even seeks him out in a sort of passive-aggressive mentor relationship just as a new serial killer has begun to work his way across town (Jared Leto, doing the same funny voice he did in Blade Runner 2049).
Exhaustion with these types of efforts aside, it’s just so damned predictable. You know every moment that’s going to happen before it happens, and it plays out exactly as you’d imagine, with Washington desperately trying to hold the whole thing together and stave off whatever weird pantomime energy Malek and Leto felt like dropping into the set that day. It really cannot be undersold just how bad they both are in this. I realize Leto is an acquired taste, one whose “method” energy I have more tolerance for than most, but if this half-assed film does nothing else, it underscores just how narrow a performer Malek is, and slick supercop is definitely not in his range. Ironically, this is absolutely the part Washington would have played in the early to mid 90’s.
Putting aside your ability to easily read the tea leaves on this thing, and the performances that consistently pull you out, there’s just no real weight or intrigue on offer, with leaden pacing that just leads you to wonder what’s happening on twitter instead. It looks nice though, I’ll say that for it. John Schwartzman is basically an ongoing Hancock collaborator, so he hasn’t had a lot of stand-out material to work his charms on, but it seems that nighttime LA backdrop, which always brings out the best in a cinematographer worth their salt, did the trick. Lots of moody hues throughout, and great shots of cars and people lit my streetlamps. It ain’t exactly Thief, but you take what you can get.
Hancock is no superstar filmmaker, but he could have had his pick of projects these days surely. Why he decided to go with what was lining his desk drawer is a mystery far more interesting than anything The Little Things has to offer.
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