The Little Things (2021 | USA | 127 minutes | John Lee Hancock)

Leading up to its simultaneous debut in some movie theaters and on HBO Max this week, The Little Things’s marketing team wants you to know one important thing: The gritty cop drama  boasts a cast led by not one, not two, but three Academy Award winners. Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto lend their star power to this adequate film, but not much else.

It’s 1990 and Los Angeles County has a big problem on their hands: a serial killer is terrorizing the area. The sheriff’s office is stumped and they don’t have any real promising suspects and the public is demanding answers. From the nearby Kern County Sheriff’s office, John “Deke” Deacon (Washington) is hanging around LA county and asking questions and his persistence leads himself into the investigation. That’s grating for many because, we learn, Deacon was one of their colleagues before, but he worked a case so hard that it broke him. He’s disgraced and now lives alone in a dilapidated shanty. LASO has basically moved on without him, including his ex-wife, who still works for the LASO. The ambitious Jim Baxter (Malek) has his job now. 

Deacon and Baxter finally hone in on a suspect: the creepy Albert Sparma (Leto). He’s, well, he’s a creep. There’s not much else to say. He calls himself a “crime enthusiast” and he doesn’t mind being the primary suspect in a serial killer investigation, he even welcomes it, he just knows it’ll be very hard for Deacon and Baxter to make a case against him. The movie is basically a cat and mouse game between the suspect Sparma and the law enforcement following him.

Denzel Washington is one of the most reliable, great actors working, and has been for as long as I can remember. He is not phoning it in here (and neither are Malek or Leto, though I think both of their Oscars are from being in the right place when lightning struck). He’s just not given much in the way of a memorable script to work with. When he starred in The Bone Collector over twenty years ago, as the legendary, paralyzed detective Lincoln Rhyme, he’s unforgettable. When he’s here, he reminds the viewer of his better movies.

That’s the rub, there have been a handful of great, gritty police dramas like The Bone Collector, but also Kiss the Girls, and David Fincher’s Seven, plus television shows like season one of “True Detective,” and even the Lincoln Rhyme reboot that lasted a season and starred the great Russell Hornsby. Yet those movies and TV shows all leaned into their creepiness in one way or another. Jared Leto probably gives my favorite performance here but that is mostly because Rami Malek and Denzel Washington could’ve been swapped out for other actors without anyone noticing. 

The title comes from a line that Washington says twice in the movie, telling Malek, “it’s the little things that get you caught.” It has a different context each time he says it, but the point is that noticing seemingly minor details is important in big cases. You could be forgiven for mistaking The Little Things with TV shows “A Million Little Things,” “Big Little Lies,” or “Little Fires Everywhere.” Visual entertainment with “little” in the title is the new “bands with ‘wolf’ in their name” cliche from the mid-aughts. 

What’s so disappointing about The Little Things is not that it’s terrible per se, it’s fine. It’s that it squanders so much acting talent with a middling script. 

Time is precious, even when stuck at home in quarantine. There’s not much need for something passable, and I listed several better options above.

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The Little Things is currently streaming on HBOMax.