The Little Things (2021).

“Your dick is harder than Chinese arithmetic!”

Directed by John Lee Hancock

Written by John Lee Hancock

Starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto

1. (The Stage)

a.k.a. “No Country for Smart Men”.

Sidetracked during a routine evidence collection trip, Deputy Joe “Deke” Deacon mentors young detective Jim Baxter as the two hunt for a Los Angeles serial killer…a killer who may be connected to a case Joe failed to solve five years prior.

2. (The Good)

You know this character has a troubled past because he always looks sad!

The performances by the three leads in this film are really great. Denzel is magnetic as usual, even if he’s playing the same character he always seems to play. Rami Malek is fine as Jim Baxter, a determined dumbass detective. Jared Leto is fantastic as Albert Sparma, an appliance repair technician who loves true crime, strip clubs, and murder photos but doesn’t own any clothes aside from his repair technician uniform.

The message of the film portrays a powerful one - the sins of your past will consume your future if you let them, and that the burden of unsolved cases can weigh heavily upon the people who failed to solve them. Unfortunately, it presents that message in a way that’s at best clunky and at worst just downright stupid.

3. (The Bad)

You won’t care about this character because he’s really stupid.

Aside from the cast, I thought that everything in this film was pretty bad.

The script was just plain dumb, riddled with characters who continuously made the most stupid decisions possible. Take one scene for example, in which Deke and Jim tail Sparma, a key suspect in their case. They just want to get into his apartment to check things out, so their awesome plan is to call him and tell him to meet them at a bar that happens to be a five-minute walk down the street. These same cops just followed him all day long and knew that he took public transportation to a strip club. Why didn’t they do it then, when they could have had hours in the apartment? This stupidity just pales in comparison to a scene later in the film when Baxter decides to take a ride with Sparma.

I get what Hancock was going for with the latter scene. Baxter is supposed to be so sleep deprived on a time crunch that he’d literally do anything to catch the guy…but when he makes the decision he does, I just didn’t care at that point - he deserved to be digging his own grave. So did the girl at the beginning…and the way she kneels down in front of that truck was laughable.

The editing decisions in The Little Things were also baffling. How many cuts do we need while filming two guys fucking eating breakfast? It was like Taken 3’s action scenes all over again. The gravity of certain situations just evaporates because of the directionless editing, including a key scene in an interrogation room. During a scene in which Deke tails Sparma’s car, it was if the editor wanted us to believe that Deke had lost Sparma in the darkness (he hadn’t) and then magically found him by guessing where he was going (he didn’t). Let the actors and the scenes BREATHE.

Finally, the score was not just forgettable, it was plain grating. Hearing the same five second riff play over and over again during the initial investigation scene made me want to turn the film off. I couldn’t believe that it was Thomas Newman when the credits ran.

4. (The Ugly)

Real cars on a real, non-CGI road!

There’s a scene in which Deke is driving a car and has to turn to get onto an on-ramp. it’s clearly Denzel sitting in a car with an infuriatingly bad background inserted via green screen, but the car is turning and Denzel never turns the wheel. It was like kids sitcom level awful. How does something that ugly get past everyone? They just never got a shot of Denzel turning the steering wheel to the right? Are you kidding me?

Also, for a film set in 1990 that is literally titled for its emphasis on small, important details, you’d think someone would have caught the T-Mobile store with Android ads that the hookers are standing in front of.

5. (The End)

This character only has one outfit, his work jumpsuit.

This is a forgettable, stupid film with some great, wasted performances. If you’re a big Denzel or Leto fan, I guess it’s worth checking out for their performances, but I cannot recommend spending two hours on this. Apparently it was written in the late 80’s/early 90’s. It’s hard to believe that it didn’t get better than that after 30 years on the shelf.