Rent The Little Things (2021)

Dull Police Mystery Thriller - The Little Things review by GI

A plodding and at times senseless police procedural thriller that is somewhat pretentious and certainly the director, John Lee Hancock, can't make up his mind whether he's making a genre mystery/serial killer story or some deep and profound arthouse piece. Denzil Washington tries his best with the material but you can sort of tell he's struggling at times. Rami Malek is woefully miscast here or his range is too limited and Jared Leto plays another dark twisted character in his usual over exaggerated way, he looks the part but also slips into parody as a Hammer Horror Rasputin type. Washington is a small town and tired old cop sent to LA to collect some evidence but finds he gets embroiled in a case involving the ritualistic murder of prostitutes. It seems he was once a big detective in LA but left when a case, possibly linked with this latest one, went haywire. Malek is the bright young detective working the case who kowtows to the experienced older man whose mantra is that it's all in the little things where the case gets solved. Leto is the Charles Mansonesque suspect. The plot goes all over the shop, there's lots of talking and the cops do some startlingly stupid things. It's a dull film really and disappointment.

A slow, lifeless & massively missed opportunity considering the cast & filmmaking team involved - The Little Things review by TB

I so wanted this to be amazing. The trailer looked great, the cast incredible (especially Rami Malek coming off the back of his Oscar win,) and the actual story had the potential for something incredible. It was teased as a slow-building, old-style whodunnit cop story, particularly in the style of Insomnia, one of my favourite cop thrillers of all time. Amusingly, Insomnia also starred 3 Oscar winners and focused on an oddball loner weirdo. But sadly that's where the similarities end.

The film as a whole is dreadful. It is an unbelievably dated, boring and glacial trudge through a standard rote story. The biggest problem was the script, which is where the dated criticism is most poignant. The film itself was first written in 1993 and you get the sense that had it been made & edited then, it would have turned out very different and probably would have been inestimably better. But it got stuck in development hell and sadly this is the result.

And I genuinely wanted to love it. It does have a lot going for it. The cast are some of the best actors working today, but they are squandered. For example, one of the biggest missed opportunities was with Malek and Leto. The two of them have and can tap into such a creepy, idiosyncratic and unsettling energy that I thought a proper face-off between them, either in an interrogation room or out on the street would not only be phenomenal but also a given. But this never properly happens. All we get is Malek as the dependable cop who follows Leto and then when the two do meet face to face, it ends not with a bang but a damp squib.

And speaking of Leto, there is something frustrating in the way that he is portrayed, both in terms of his attitude & also his look. I know that there is a temptation in these types of films to make the suspect look guilty, but this is just taken to ludacris levels in The Little Things. Albert Sparma is every single caricature & stereotype it's possible to be. He looks like what a tabloid-reading, curtain-twitching paranoid middle-class housewife would imagine a man suspected of those type of crimes would look like. The only thing Leto doesn't do is cackle, look at the screen and scream in a high pitched voice "I'm doing these evil things!!! Hahaha!" And this is another thing which totally derails the movie: it is too ridiculous to work in a real-world drama and would even struggle in a fantasy/comic book world.

Washington brings the usual gravitas he can muster with ease, but again the film wastes him, which is even more criminal considering the first few scenes with him set up what could be a fascinating story.

The film is fairly competently directed by John Lee Hancock and does have some achingly beautiful night shots as well. But this cannot and does not rescue the film from its schlocky & slow path towards an ending with no real payoff and a movie that never manages to capitalise on the potential it had in spades.