Review: The Little Things

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

John Lee Hancock's "The Little Things" makes up for what it lacks in originality with atmosphere, mood, style, solid performances and a great open ended finale. Its plot mechanics might seem as if they've been selected from the David Fincher playbook - the picture's style resembles that director's classic "Seven," although the screenplay for "The Little Things" was written years before that film - but its eerie, obsessive aura is often compelling.

The film is set in the 1990s, and there's a good explanation for that. Hancock wrote the screenplay about three decades ago and sat on it for years. Updating a criminal investigation picture would have required a complete overhaul, considering today's reliance on forensics and all sorts of new technology that is used to aid homicide investigations.

The film opens with a young woman on a deserted highway outside of Los Angeles, singing along to The B-52's "Roam," an ironic choice, and then being tormented by a creep in a car. She just barely escapes with her life. We cut to Bakersfield, where deputy Joe Deacon (Denzel Washington) is dealing with small town cop issues. He was formerly a big shot L.A. detective, but we get the sense that his stint in the City of Angels ended poorly.

Deacon's boss gives him an assignment that will require him to travel to L.A. and coordinate with that city's police department. Once there, he overhears a press conference being given by a hot shot cop named Baxter (Rami Malek) on a series of brutal murders that seem to ring a bell for Deacon. On occasion, we see flashbacks of a previous case Deacon had worked in L.A. that culminated with the discovery of several young women discovered nude, dead and tied to a rock. Similar to the case being investigated by Baxter, the young women had bags placed over their heads.

Although the two men get a bad first impression of each other, Baxter eventually asks Deacon - who is stuck in L.A. for the weekend due to the assignment given to him back in Bakersfield - to get involved in his investigation. Baxter is seemingly impressed by Deacon's observations at the crime scene of the serial killer's latest victim. And yes, this plot thread is a bit far fetched, but it's necessary for the two to team up. 

Much like David Fincher's far superior "Zodiac," Hancock's film is less about serial killing than it is about obsession, and how his film's two detectives go desperately down the rabbit hole - albeit for different reasons - in their attempts to catch the killer. The film heads in a different direction after they stumble upon a suspect - a creepy mechanic named Albert Sparma (Jared Leto, looking like Charles Manson) - who seems too good to be true.

Leto appears to be having fun hamming it up as Sparma, a self-described crime buff who seems to understand the logistics of police work, and appears to be - as the British say - taking the piss with the two detectives, leading them on to believe he might be the killer, but withholding just enough to make them doubt. Sparma's actual motives might seem questionable - and again, far fetched - but his taunting of Deacon and Baxter is what ultimately leads to the film's ambiguous, open ending - which I personally liked, although I can see it infuriating others.

As I've mentioned, "The Little Things" doesn't really break any new ground narratively, although to be fair it was written several years before the glut of 1990s serial killer thrillers like "The Bone Collector," "Kiss the Girls" and "Copycat." It's way better than those entries in the genre, although not on par with such classics as "Zodiac," "Seven" or "The Silence of the Lambs."

However, the film still has quite a bit going for it - Washington gives the typically strong performance you'd expect of him as the obsessive workaholic Deacon, while Leto's work is fun in an over-the-top manner and Malik is more of the straightforward, by-the-book cop - that is, until he isn't.

The film is also visually compelling - the moody night photography accompanied by Thomas Newman's almost soothing score goes a long way - and like many neo noirs, it makes great use of Los Angeles as a backdrop, from the entrancing scenes in which cars trail other vehicles on darkly lit, lonesome highways to one particularly memorable shot of a woman jogger being pursued by a vehicle down a dark alleyway with the L.A. skyline in the distance.

So, while "The Little Things" may have an aura of familiarity in terms of its storytelling devices and its focus on detectives given over to obsession - although, for me, that theme is often what makes these types of films compelling - the movie is rich in style and presentation, and by the time I reached its haunting culmination, whether the case was brought to a satisfying conclusion was almost besides the point. Hancock's film isn't a classic of the genre, but it's an effective and enjoyable potboiler.