A ‘The Little Things’ Review
The Little Things is a reminder that sometimes, our passions are bad, and the projects we’ve dreamt about pursuing for decades, aren’t worth giving time and money to.
The year is 1993, and a gentleman in his mid-30s named John Lee Hancock pens a script written specifically for Steven Spielberg, just as Spielberg is finishing up work on Schindler’s List. The script is called The Little Things, a contemporary cop drama about a serial killer who kills young girls and evades capture and even suspicion.
Spielberg passes on the script, calling it “too dark.” From here, the script travels around Hollywood, with Clint Eastwood, Warren Beaty, and Danny DeVito all being attached to direct at different points, until finally, in 2019, Hancock decides it’s time to direct his cop drama himself. He had served his time in the studio system, directing a handful of movies from 1991 to 2019 with varying degrees of success, and now he wanted to make his dream script, which no one else was bold enough to make.
But let me tell you something: Sometimes, you need to let the past die. John Lee Hancock made a serious error in getting this film out into the world.
Hancock’s version of the film, just released in theaters and on HBO Max, is no longer a contemporary story. The Little Things has become a period piece about an aging sheriff’s deputy in Kern County, California, who becomes consumed by a murder in Los Angeles, similar to a triple murder that he worked as a detective five years prior. When the trailer for The Little Things first dropped in December, it seemed like a brilliant marketing move to drive traffic to HBO Max by promising a new, exciting film from one of the best and most beloved actors of all time. I would encourage you to go back and watch this trailer before you watch the movie because it will help you to see why I’m so irked by this film. I thought we were getting a new entrant in the Denzel Garbage Crime Hall of Fame. “Garbage crime” is a subgenre of film that is built around telling an extremely compelling story full of violence and an often extrajudicial sense of justice. I first heard the term introduced on my favorite podcast, “The Big Picture,”; We all have garbage-crime films we love. Their quality ranges from negligible crap to awards fare, but they’re always enjoyable. Denzel is one of the patron saints of the genre, putting out such bangers as Safe House, The Equalizer 1 and 2, and 2 Guns. Everyone has some favorites that fit snugly into garbage crime, and we all defend them with our lives. But with The Little Things, we are left with a mess, a film that wants to be a psychological thriller about the toll that “the job” takes on a man, but instead is just a jumbled up bag of cop-drama pieces poured out on a table like Scrabble tiles.
If you read other reviews or hear people talk about The Little Things, they’ll mostly cite one main complaint with the film. That complaint is that the film is poorly written and derivative. I’m curious to know if John Lee Hancock took the time to go back to his original script and try and touch up the script. What ends up on screen is the build-a-bear version of a serial killer flick. There are obvious ties to the work of David Fincher, but the influences go further than Mindhunter, Zodiac, and Se7en. It can’t help but throw out a version of the stereotypical “You know, you and I aren’t so different” line, and it completes the bingo card by having some hard-nosed senior police officers warning a younger cop not to “ruin his career” for justice. It’s not just the writing and the cliches that send The Little Things off the cliff into bad film territory, but also the tone of the script, the huge difference in the kinds of performances, and its indecision about what sort of film it wants to be. All of these issues are interlocked because there’s just something about the film that doesn’t feel right. It opens with a Zodiac-esque sequence of a killer chasing a young girl on a small county road outside of Los Angeles; it’s meant to invoke a feeling of fear for this young woman’s life. We’re supposed to catch a glimpse of this deadly killer on the loose. This is setting the tone that the film will be a high tension thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Just a few minutes later, it shifts into investigative-drama reminiscent of a CSI episode, and Hancock chooses to stage the next hour or so of the film as this slow-moving drama about two detectives looking for the lynchpin clue that will get them their man. The tone then shifts again to an unbearable final half-hour that seems to be underwritten and sends this movie even further into the pit of bad films. It’s also worth mentioning that one of the two detectives is outright poor casting, and you’d be right to assume that it isn’t Denzel. Rami Malek isn’t only getting out-acted in every scene, he seems not to know what kind of movie he wants to be in. Every minute of screen time he has is spent trying really hard to give off the sort of energy that belongs in high-drama awards fare, but what The Little Things needs is camp.
Denzel Washington has a certain swagger and personality about him every time he plays a police officer. He’s confident, he’s usually underappreciated, he’s got a good rapport with a portion of his unit, and knows a number of criminals in the area. You can’t quite call The Little Things camp, but it is certainly Denzel. He’s amazing in everything he participates in, and in a movie like this, he doesn’t really need to be anything other than Denzel who got a divorce and has a bad job. Much like LeBron James or Michael Jordan, it's the coach’s — Hancock’s — job to assemble a team, a film and a cast, around him. Jared Leto goes all out in his performance and is the only other actor who seems to have figured out what could save this movie and this team. He’s Dennis Rodman. The camp he’s exhibiting could be considered high art and fits into the niche that a garbage-crime villain should fit into. It makes me sad that the script and direction never meet the performances that he and Denzel are giving. Nothing in the direction and filmmaking is noteworthy with the exception of Thomas Newman’s score.
You might think I believe Hollywood should no longer make films like The Little Things, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m perfectly fine with people essentially remaking Se7en every couple of years, as long as they don’t lose what makes those rehashes enjoyable. The performers need to dive headfirst into their roles, but the filmmakers need to remember that they don’t need to make grand statements about humanity or life. Leave that to the Bergmans and Hanekes of the world; just stick to the brief. I can’t really say that Denzel deserves better — the man is known for starring in absolutely awful movies that he brings some serious heat to — but I do think we moviegoers deserve better.