The Little Things (2021)

Film: The Little Things (2021)

Stars: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto

Director: John Lee Hancock

Oscar History: Leto made it with both the Globes & SAG, but thankfully missed when Oscar came a-calling.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

The Oscar Viewing Project usually gives me joy.  Rediscovering films that I otherwise wouldn't have encountered is a blessing, something I relish doing & nearly every year there are 8-10 movies that I had barely heard of that suddenly become a part of me, they're so special.  But there are also movies that come with this project that, well, make me reconsider why I'm doing this.  In the run-up to the Oscars, I usually have a few films that are right on the cusp of a nomination that I would only see if they were Oscar-blessed...I have no urge to watch the movies.  In a normal year I'd wait to see if they were cited & then head to a movie theater, but in 2021, when you have to navigate streaming platforms, when a movie is free but only viewable for a short window, you take advantage, and with The Little Things recently on HBO Max, I had to take my chances.  So thanks to the bizarre inclusion of Jared Leto at both the Globes & SAG Awards, I caught the meandering, critically-reviled Little Things.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with a story that has almost no connection to the rest of the movie, so we'll skip it (like much of the film, it feels superfluous).  Instead we'll move into the present, where Deke (Washington), a tired cop who has a reputation for working outside-the-bounds, is put on a case with Jim Baxter (Malek), a more modern detective who wants to move up through the ranks by finding the culprit in a string of serial murders.  The two butt heads, but start to form a bond (even though Jim is warned about Deke's unorthodox reputation), and eventually they meet someone who fits the bill for the crime-a kooky man named Albert Sparma (Leto), who is obsessed with the crimes & with the police officers solving them.  Neither cop can pin the crimes on Sparma, but they become obsessed with the idea that he did it, particularly Jim, and one night Sparma takes Jim to the place he supposedly buried his latest, missing victim.  While there, Sparma states, after Jim has been digging for hours, that he isn't the killer, but Jim in a fit of rage hits him with a shovel, killing him.  Deke comes across the scene, and helps cover up the crime, as we learn through flashback that Deke once accidentally killed a survivor in his last murder case, and that's why he's haunted.  The film ends with Jim thinking that Sparma did it (due to evidence that Deke gives him that we learn before the credits he purchased rather than found at Sparma's apartment), and both men trying to move on from the death.

The Little Things wants to be a profound version of Se7en, but it lacks all of the visual cues, acting flare, & talent of what makes David Fincher's films work.  I wasn't sad that it was missing some of the violence (I live alone & it's the middle of a pandemic where I can barely see anyone...I don't need that energy these days), but there needed to be some energy, and there really isn't any.

The ending was lazy, with us to believe that Denzel takes on all of the weight of a very loose lie?  We're meant to believe that Leto's character was just strange, not a murderer (in which case Rami Malek's character killed an innocent, albeit bizarre, man), but that lie will unravel quickly.  The odds are not strong that the serial killer is going to stop, in which case Malek's character will know what happens the second he returns to work or reads a newspaper.  It's a stupid ending without any sense of logic behind it unless we assume that Leto's character is the killer...which none of the evidence points toward.

The performances are pretty uniformly bad.  Washington is the best (duh), but he brings little of his great character work to this worn, poorly-scripted part.  Leto is next of the bunch, and is genuinely awful.  This man doesn't exist-there's nothing in this performance that points to someone that happens before the screen began, and he just plays him as a "weird dude"...Leto, one of the least-deserving recent actors to win an Oscar, is joined by the other least-deserving recent winner Rami Malek, who plays this part like he's on novocaine.  There's NOTHING in this work-he's a blank vessel of human being as played...how do these men have an award that Ralph Fiennes & Glenn Close don't?  That's the real mystery of The Little Things.