Here is a self-serious serial killer thriller that fees like it was made in the ‘90s. The fact that the first draft for writer-director John Lee Hancock’s “The Little Things” was written in 1993, only reinforces how the resulting film feels old, cliched and damn-near redundant.
Hancock’s film tries to pretend it has more substance than it actually does, that it’s going somewhere we might not expect, and that it does do, to a certain extent. The finale does work, but by then it’s too little too late, the setup, the first 90 minutes or so, feels so familiarly dull and borrowed from far better films (“Seven” and “Zodiac”) that you can’t forgive any of the surprises that might seep in during the final quarter.
The film, an investigatory puzzle, features surprisingly uncharacteristic work from Denzel Washington as deputy sheriff “Deke,” a man who finds himself thrust back into a case he’s not supposed to be involved in. Deke is a has-been member of the force, something happened years ago, we don’t know what exactly, that demoted him to less rewarding pedestrian work. But when a woman gets murdered, the obsessive in Deke can’t help but start nosing around the work of Jimmy (Rami Malek), the lead detective in the case, to the point where he becomes Jimmy’s unofficial case partner.
It’s not that Washington’s performance is bad, it’s just that the role is severely overwritten to the point of making his Deke a standardly vanilla character. There isn’t any substance or complexities here, the part could have easily just been played by a cardboard cut-up of Washington and not much would have changed in the narrative. Whereas Malek comes off as awkward in the role of brooding NYPD detective, a performance so at odds with the character written, it does make one wonder if Malek has much of a career ahead of him on the big screen beyond playing Freddie Mercury.
Deke and Jimmy’s prime suspect is a local who works at a repair shop (Jared Leto) — he may or may not be the killer. One thing’s for sure, he acts as if he has something to hide, always aware of the tailing by the detectives and snakily playful in his responses to their questioning. Leto, a consummate Oscar-winning actor, more or less succeeds in playing weirdo antagonist here, with his sunken eyes and greasily ruffled hair. It’s a winning performance especially because it shouldn’t work, the character is clearly a riff on Kevin Spacey’s John Doe in “Seven.”
The similarities to Fincher’s classic don’t end there, Hancock has the chutzpah of copying the finale of that film as killer and cop drive out to a desert area so that a shocking reveal can occur. There’s taunting on the part of Leto, personal jabs at Jimmy’s family and the moment when cop has to skew his morals to attain a higher satisfaction. If this film was released in the ‘90s then maybe it would have felt a little more immediate and relevant, but not only has cinema completely overdone the procedural genre, so has the small screen with the infinite variations on the whodunnit rummaging all over the Netflix library.
SCORE: D