The Little Things Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out The Little Things opens in theaters in the US and on HBO Max on January 29. The movie will be available on HBO Max for 31 days from its theatrical release in the U.S. included at no additional cost to subscribers. Our reviewer watched the movie via a digital screener. Read more on IGN's policy on movie reviews in light of COVID-19 here. [poilib element="accentDivider"] The Little Things’ title and lead character may expound on the importance of the intricate details of a homicide case, but the movie itself paints with an awfully broad brush. An ex-detective who plays by his own rules. An up-and-coming hotshot investigator whose hunger for justice leads him to bite off more than he can chew. A murder suspect whose wanton bizareness basically screams “it was me!” Despite these caricatures being played by a trio of Oscar-winning leading men, The Little Things does little to set itself apart from other films in the neo-noir genre. Set in 1990, The Little Things opens with Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington) five years into a stint as a sheriff’s deputy in Kern County, California after a botched murder investigation ended his career as a homicide detective in Los Angeles. A menial errand finds Deke back in his old stomping grounds just as a new series of killings which evoke his final case are confounding the LAPD. Deke crosses paths with Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek), the case’s lead investigator, and the two join forces to narrow the search for the murderer. On paper, casting Washington and Malek in the veteran/rookie archetypes makes a lot of sense. The chemistry and mutual respect between the two keep the film interesting in its first act while both the killer’s identity and Deke’s past are shrouded in mystery. The Little Things meanders primarily between those throughlines, with Malek’s Jimmy too often serving as a window into Deke’s thinking and his personal reasons for wanting this murderer cuffed too little explored. That’s a shame, as Jimmy’s slick confidence, ambition, and occasionally explosive temper give Malek a few opportunities to upstage Washington, and that’s no easy feat. Washington, as is so often the case, has charisma to spare, but it doesn’t quite fit the character he’s playing. Deke is supposed to be haunted by his failures, but he’s too vaguely affected by them in the present day for that pathos to come through as he seeks personal redemption in solving these new murders. [ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://ift.tt/36hjwkF] The man that investigation leads to is Jared Leto’s Albert Sparma, a gaunt handyman who saves the back half of The Little Things from being a total bore thanks to an unwavering commitment to being as off-putting as possible. Of the three leads, Leto has the most fun, his crime buff of a murder suspect delighting in the “did he or didn’t he?” question at the heart of the film. When Sparma is interrogated by Deke and Jimmy, he cloyingly invokes his fifth amendment right to remain silent, but gosh, everything about him is screaming that he’s guilty. The question of Sparma’s involvement in both Deke and Jimmy’s cases takes some unexpected twists and turns, perhaps most unexpectedly in how the film chooses to resolve his role in the story, but if you’re paying attention to the, ahem… little things, you’ll draw much more solid conclusions than some of the characters end up at in the film. Aside from Washington, Malek, and Leto, the rest of the cast is just there to dump exposition or throw wrenches into Deke and Jimmy’s progress as the plot requires. None of the supporting characters are utilized as foils to the leads, letting them speak for themselves. Trouble is, not one of them has anything that interesting to say. You start to get the sense after Deke monologues to a corpse that The Little Things thinks it’s a lot more clever than it is, but none of the ways that it toys with its genre trappings feel all that subversive or elegantly handled. Deke warns Jimmy against getting too attached to this case but hunts Sparma with equal fervor. Jimmy increasingly abandons his ideals in pursuit of the truth, but where the story leaves him absolves him of any kind of personal reckoning as a result of his choices. There’s a consistent disconnect between what the characters do and how they claim to feel about it, and it leaves The Little Things feeling muddled and unclear on what it’s trying to say. That problem extends from the page onto the screen, where stylistically, The Little Things rests on its laurels with straightforward cinematography that rarely does the lackluster storytelling any favors. The lone exception to The Little Things’ lack of flair is how Deke visualizes the murdered women he seeks justice for, a chilling and somber representation of the thinly-realized victims that hints at what The Little Things could have been and maybe the only memorable image that doesn’t rely on the macabre freakiness of Leto’s Sparma. The period setting is also largely glossed over, with the powder keg that was early 90s Los Angeles barely acknowledged outside of occasional references to the lacking technology, a missed opportunity to generate some tension in a film desperately wanting for it. It leaves The Little Things feeling like a relic of a bygone era, which makes a lot of sense when you consider director John Lee Hancock wrote the first draft of the script nearly 30 years ago. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=everything-coming-to-hbo-max&captions=true"]

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