Treating characters with such distance, as though Hancock knows the neo-noir subgenre is outside of his comfort zone, one is amazed when the movie finds its stride. To grapple with how the unsolved murder haunts Deke, Hancock instead uses hackneyed procedural elements, such as the cop speaking to a victim’s body in the morgue, as messy avenues into the characters’ interiority. These tidbits feel like talkative speed bumps on the path to understanding Washington’s character and the intricacies of Jimmy’s investigation. Later, another character notes that “K-heart, love songs of the ’50s and ’60s” is playing on the radio. In a sequence focused on examining a gruesome murder scene, Jimmy explains to anyone within earshot his commitment to the job. The Little Things struggles to gain momentum due to Hancock’s ironic fascination with the little things.
In Jimmy’s crusading eyes, no missing person is deceased until they appear at the morgue - an intriguing mirror to Hancock’s own unyielding optimism for the world magically correcting its flaws. To capture the murderer, and in a bid to quell his own ghosts, he teams up with Jimmy (Malek), a dedicated hotshot detective whose obsessive drive bears a resemblance to his own intensity.
THE LITTLE THINGS MOVIE SERIAL
The pertinent exposition centers on Deke (Washington), a small-town cop, who returns to his former stomping grounds of Los Angeles to discover that a serial killer hunting women is on the loose. The film is a grim, slow-burn thriller concerning regret and obsession that shows off the director’s range.Īs totems of old- and new-school detective work, Oscar winners Rami Malek and Denzel Washington are, initially, an awkward pairing due to the incongruity of an overexplaining screenplay. Yet, with The Little Things, Warner Bros.’ first simultaneous theatrical and HBO Max release of 2021, he nearly pulls it off. The director, based on his record, would seem ill-equipped to map his penchant for feel-good stories onto a vicious landscape, and even less suited to tackling a psychologically intense neo-noir wherein moral ambiguity reigns. In The Blind Side, rather than confronting the real racial and socioeconomic inequities Black folks like Michael Oher face, Hancock highlighted the efforts of his white, adoptive mother. In The Highwaymen, the writer-director told the story of Bonnie and Clyde by sidestepping the danger inherent in Arthur Penn’s classic for a sanguine dad/road movie about the cops who chased them. Writer-director John Lee Hancock is not on Hollywood’s gritty-drama speed dial.
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