Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Little Things’ on HBO Max, an Old School Serial-Killer Thriller in Which Three Oscar Winners Wallow in the Gloom

HBO Max movie The Little Things is a serial-killer procedural-cop thriller throwing us back to the 1990s without apology. Notably, it’s one of the films Warner Bros. intended to release in pre-pandemic, theaters-first fashion — a methodology that, a year after the world changed so dramatically, seems as old-school as the film’s premise. (Don’t forget, you’ve only got a month to watch it before it evaporates from HBO Max for a while.) Writer-director John Lee Hancock shifts from the feelgood vibes of his best-known work (The Blind Side, The Rookie, Saving Mr. Banks) to bleaker pastures, with Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto in his employ. Of course, a headlining trio of Oscar winners doesn’t guarantee a good movie, so let’s see if it lives up to its pedigree.

THE LITTLE THINGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Oct., 1990. A tense scene: A young woman drives alone down a long, empty road. A car pulls up aggressively behind her, aside her, passes her. She makes some bad decisions — stops the car, gets out of the car, doesn’t get back into the car after there’s nobody around to help, doesn’t bother to find a phone to call the cops — but barely escapes a man with a trunkful of scary implements. We only ever see his shoes.

Bakersfield, Calif.: Graying, paunchy deputy Joe “Deke” Deacon (Washington) lives in a run-down home on a dusty patch of land with a raggedy old dog. His chief sends him to Los Angeles to fetch evidence for a case, and we immediately get the sense that Deke is capable of being more than an errand boy sent by grocery clerks, etc. Our hunch is correct. He walks into the L.A.P.D. CSI office and turns a few heads. He’s greeted with a melange of friendliness and testiness that tells us he has a rep. He used to work here. Investigator. Serial murderers. He used to be good. What happened? Stuff we’ll find out later.

The guy filling Deke’s gumshoes is an arrogant hotshot named Jim Baxter (Malek). His face is on TV a lot. High-profile case. You guessed it: serial murderer. And coincidentally, Deke is right there in the office when Baxter gets a call. There’s a new murder scene. Wanna tag along? Sure why not, Deke says. He puts some fresh eyes on a woman’s dead body, heads back out of town on the highway, looks over, sees three carefree young women in a convertible, turns around, checks into a fleabag hotel, starts helping Baxter. Stakeouts. Legwork. Fetching coffee. Sifting through trash. Visiting his old friend, the coroner (Michael Hyatt). Having flashbacks to five years ago when his life went awry. Suspension, divorce, bypass surgery. Now he sits in his hotel room as the ghosts of dead women manifest at the foot of the bed and behind the curtains.

But wait — Jared Leto is in this movie too, right? Yes. He’s the prime suspect, Albert Sparma, an appliance repairman who looks like he lathers, rinses and repeats with a quart of Pennzoil. Eyes like a methed-out owl. Total weirdo. They haul him in for a lively chat, show him a graduation photo of one of the victims. “Eleven more, you can make a calendar,” he quips. They don’t have a reason to hold him. No evidence. But jeez, he acts the part, plays the cat-and-mouse game, although who’s the cat and who’s the mouse here? He, the case, the whole entirety of existence maybe, take Deke and Baxter to a very dark place. And there might be no return.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: How about two other Denzel Washington serial-killer movies, The Bone Collector and Fallen? And so the stalwart star officially surpasses Morgan Freeman — you know, Kiss the Girls and GOAT serial-killer thriller Seven — as the king of this broody genre.

Performance Worth Watching: Let’s all watch Denzel marinate in a stew of existential dread and regret for two hours! “It’s never over,” he says, sitting in the dark by himself, a single tear rolling down his cheek. He’s still magnetic, even when he’s off-the-charts moody.

Memorable Dialogue: “You thought, ‘What the heck. Life’s too short.’ And you were right.” — the most profound excerpt from Deke’s one-way conversation with a cadaver

Sex and Skin: A fair number of naked female corpses in crime scenes or on the coroner’s slab.

Our Take: The Little Things is an engrossing, mostly by-the-numbers cop drama that slowly submerges us/the characters into the moral swamp until good and evil blur into an indeterminate mass where any attempt to discern one shade of black from the next seems futile, and takes everyone deep enough into the smeary bleak that we’re not sure if anyone will ever find their way out. Have a nice day!

And that’s where Hancock subverts the formula somewhat, courting a Zodiac-esque answers-just-lead-to-more-questions frustrating ambiguity more than the look-at-the-horrible-things-we’re-capable-of thematic fodder of most films in the post-Silence of the Lambs pantheon. Please note that I invoke these titles as points of reference, not comparison. They’re benchmarks for a reason, and watchable as The Little Things can be, it’s definitely sub-great, but supra-mediocre. Many movies of its ilk seek simple answers for questions of good and evil via histrionic-showdown finales, but, without giving away too much, Hancock prefers to nurture the dark wisdom that closure is a myth.

Part of the journey into the hoary deeps involves immersion into the tedium of Deke and Baxter’s work. We spend a fair amount of time watching Malek and Washington watch Leto from afar, sitting in a car, losing their shit loudly or quietly, doesn’t matter. The emptiness grows, its arms wrapping them in its chilly embrace. Another woman goes missing. Another body turns up in Deke’s flashbacks. Another angsty day goes by. FUN.

There is some entertainment to be had here. Leto looks the part of the sociopathic loon, like something spawned from a boil on Charles Manson’s greasy back. His affectations are showy and implausible, sure, but nonetheless chilling; as someone who doesn’t let acting get in the way of grandiose gestures, Leto remains a love-him-or-hate-him performer. Washington continues to elevate middling fare to watchability with sheer charisma, and Malek hangs with him. The narrative shifts from Deke’s burdens to Baxter’s, as if the elder dick is passing along the weight of the great everything to the relative newb. Baxter has the procedures down, but needs some schooling in the nature of darkness. For Deke, it’s just another training day.

Our Call: STREAM IT. In many ways, The Little Things almost shamelessly revels in the stuff of many gloomy cop flicks before it. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Nah. But Denzel’s still the man — the man who makes sure a movie is better than it probably needs to be.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Little Things on HBO Max