HBO Max’s ‘The Little Things’ is a tepid ’90s throwback: Movie review

The Little Things is brand-new on HBO Max this month, but you’d be forgiven for thinking you half-remember it from flipping channels back in the ’90s. Not only is it set in that era, it feels like it was made then — and in fact the script, by writer-director John Lee Hancock, dates back to that decade. The film’s throwback qualities are prominent, and not always for the better.

It does have its charms — chiefly Denzel Washington in the lead role of Joe “Deke” Deacon, a Kern County deputy sheriff who’s still haunted by a homicide case he failed to crack years ago when he was still a detective with the LAPD. A strong, silent type with a prickly intelligence and a haunted expression, Deke is the kind of role Washington could play in his sleep. But The Little Things is an effective reminder of why Washington is still the guy to call for parts like these. He may not be plumbing any new depths, but he brings to Deke the seemingly effortless magnetism that’s kept him at the top of the industry all these years.

Think Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs with all their weirdest, darkest, most memorable edges sanded off, and that’s The Little Things.

From there, the formula practically fills in itself: Think Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs with all their weirdest, darkest, most memorable edges sanded off, and that’s The Little Things. Deke is sent down to Los Angeles, where he clashes with a hotshot younger detective, Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek, unable to totally shake off that Mr. Robot strangeness even when it makes little sense for the character). He and Jimmy get wrapped up in a string of murders that — wouldn’t you know it — sure seem to resemble the ones that still keep Deke up at night. 

The pair start to suspect they’re searching for a single killer, as suggested by his genre-mandated creepy calling card. Some movie murderers eat people or skin people or stage elaborate tableaus.  This bites people, and also sometimes moves the bodies after he’s killed them. Ho hum. He seems to exclusively favor women, and though his tastes within that gender seem broad, the only ones The Little Things asks us to care about are the same young, pretty, “respectable” white women we’re always asked to care about. 

That lack of imagination extends to the rest of the film as well. The Little Things looks exactly as you’d expect a star-studded crime drama to look (lots of shadows, sickly fluorescent lights inside and harsh street lights outside), and sound exactly as you’d expect it to sound (lots of hard-boiled dialogue about Deke and Baxter’s pessimistic worldview). A few religious references hint at some deeper thematic reckoning that never comes, while super-literal soundtrack choices — “I Will Follow Him” when the cops are following a suspect, for example — offer diminishing returns as the film’s only joke.

The ’90s setting offers little in the way of insight into the era, but turns out to be good for keeping cell phones out of the storyline and avoiding direct commentary on the current conversation around law enforcement. Though you don’t have to look that hard to see that The Little Things falls on the side of “cops who care too much about their jobs are the only ones keeping evil and danger at bay.” In this way, like so many others, The Little Things feels as though it weren’t made today but simply discovered today, having been forgotten on some dusty shelf decades ago.

Still, for a while, it kinda works. Hancock is a competent filmmaker, if not a particularly exciting one, and fueled by the chemistry between Washington and Malek, The Little Things cruises along at an agreeable enough clip to inspire inertia: Eh, I’ve already watched this much, might as well stick around to see what happens. Then Jared Leto shows up. 

Leto’s Alfred Sparma is introduced midway through the movie as Deke and Baxter’s prime suspect, a stringy-haired weirdo who’s one step ahead of the cops at every turn and clearly relishes the cat-and-mouse game they’re playing. Leto throws his whole self into making Sparma seem as intense and unsettling as possible, but the effect, paradoxically, is to make Sparma seem totally nonthreatening — less “super-creep” than “the most annoying theater kid you know making sure everyone knows he’s playing a super-creep.” Crime drama tropes demand that Baxter and Deke find themselves disturbed and angered by him, so they are, but it becomes harder to respect them afterward. Can’t they see Sparma is just some tiresome Oscar winner braying for attention from under a shoddy fake beer belly? 

The film never recovers from this misstep, particularly as the ending twists become easier and easier to guess in advance. To Hancock’s credit, The Little Things commits to its bummer mood to the very last, avoiding an easy resolution in favor of one that acknowledges the messy aftereffects of the case. Less to his credit, even there, its complexities feel less earned than aped; to say which films the finale most strongly calls to mind would be a big spoiler. There are probably worse ways to spend an evening than with a passable pastiche of beloved ’90s hits. But when the beats feel this familiar, you’re probably better off just putting on one of those old favorites again.

The Little Things is streaming on HBO Max.