The Little Things
Director: John Lee Hancock
Writer: John Lee Hancock (wait…this dude made The Blindside)
Starring: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto, Natalie Morales, Sofia Vassilieva
Reason for watching: new release
Number of times I’ve watched it: first time viewing
***
SPOILER ALERT FOR THIS WHOLE MOVIE!
I’m gonna jump right into this plot. Deke (Denzel Washington) is an old beat cop. He goes back to his old stomping grounds near Los Angeles where a murder story reminds him of an old case that he worked and ended pushing him out LA. He helps out the on-case detective Jim Baxter (Rami Malek) who has no leads and is losing faith from his commanding officers. The two help each other out and close in on their suspect Albert Sparma (Jared Leto).
I don’t know who said it first, but someone said this movie wants to David Fincher’s Se7en. Too bad it can’t be. It’s a shame because all the pieces are there. The great actors are all there. The basic set up is there. The cinematography isn’t bad. The music is quite good actually. But the parts just don’t fit together; it’s like trying to force a puzzle piece into somewhere it isn’t meant to go. It seems lacking.
I think a big part of that has to do with the fact that this movie seems like a carbon copy of something else. Something better. I don’t mean to draw too much on that Se7en comparison, but this movie is very similar. Spoiler alert for both The Little Things and Se7en coming up. An old cop partners with a young cop to chase a serial killer. The crimes are grisly and form a pattern. They can’t pin the killer. The killer pretty much turns themselves in. They interrogate him unsuccessfully. He drives the cops crazy. They got out on a trip to nowhere. The young cop loses it, and he kills the killer. I just described the entire plot of both of these movies.
Here. I’ll sum up my feelings about this movie by talking about how they handle the main theme of this movie. During their investigation, we get flashbacks to how Deke botched his last investigation (which may have involved this same killer). While he and Baxter are working together he keeps mentioning the importance of the “little things.” The thought here is that he’s trying to prevent Baxter from making the same mistakes as him. Along the way, they break into Sparma’s apartment. They’ve been told to look for a red clip because it’s something the last victim was wearing before she disappeared. But in the end, they don’t think they’ve found anything, Baxter kills Sparma after being provoked too much. So we expect to see a flashback to Deke doing the same, right? Wrong. Instead, we flashback to Deke accidentally killing a victim of this killer who escaped because he got scared and fired a gun when he shouldn’t have.
So at the very end of the movie we see Baxter open a package from Deke with a red hair clip, like the one the final victim had before she disappeared. We find out though that instead of it being the victim’s hair clip, Deke bought it in a store to save Baxter the pain of killing a guy they had not pinned. If we were meant to draw a comparison between the two we should’ve gotten some kind of memory of deke either learning he couldn’t pin a different killer. Then the movie should’ve ended there, symbolizing the brutal cycle of bad men escaping the law and the law stepping too far
But to be fair this is a January movie. I can’t expect too much. This is the time when movie theaters dump bad movies into theaters or streaming because they don’t think the movie is gonna be very profitable. Sometimes it can extend out into February too. Regardless, I should lower my expectations.
5/10
Until I see another one.
PS #1 - that Breaking Bad clip is better than anything in this movie.
PS #2 - sorry for the Kevin Spacey clip. He sucks. We all know it.