Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

The Little Things is the kind of crime drama that’s compelling enough while you watch it, but once it’s done, there’s not much reason to give it more thought. I can’t imagine ever watching it again. Ironically, I should make a note of it. What if I forget, and somehow wind up watching it again sometime in the future? One time was okay, but watching this movie twice—what a waste of time that would be. I sure am glad I never had to pay for this one in a movie theater. Of course, were theaters open and release schedules normal, I almost certainly never would have gone to see this movie in the first place. Or would I? It is January, after all. I sat at home and watched a movie that felt like the crap that gets dumped in theaters in January with nothing better to see.

Why did I watch it, then? Certainly there are plenty of other films I could watch and expect to be better. Maybe I thought writing a bad review would be fun. Problem is, The Little Things isn’t any fun. It’s just . . . blah. Use that as your pull quote.

Odd things about this movie abound. It stars three Oscar winners: Denzel Washington as a detective who left the LAPD for a smaller force out of town after a botched investigation five years earlier; Rami Malek as the detective who has effectively replaced him; and Jared Leto as the probably-serial-killer they wind up tracking together. Three very talented actors, starring together in a dud. Washington perhaps elevates the material slightly with his performance. Malek spends a lot of time looking like he’s making an effort to be stoic. Leto’s delivery reminded me a lot of his performance in Blade Runner 2049., a very different character speaking with the same cadences. To be fair, Leto plays a sunken-eyed, paunch-bellied creep incredibly well. He also kind of looks like he just stuck a pillow under his shirt.

The story is set in Los Angeles in the nineties, and the only reason I can see for that is simply that writer-director John Lee Hancock’s script is thirty years old, and he just decided not to update the setting. I’m just astonished that after all this time he didn’t find the time to rewrite his preposterous script.

To be fair, the story, and particularly the pacing and tone, are compelling enough for some time. But The Little Things completely lost me about three quarters of the way through, with Malek’s detective making choices that make no sense whatsoever, except to serve as consequential plot turns. Problem is, there is no universe in which any cop as good at his job as this one is supposed to be would make such astonishingly idiotic moves. One or two more plot twists follow, but the are rendered meaningless by this character behaving like . . . well, like a cop in a bad movie script. In other words, suspension of disbelief only works if there is even a sliver of plausibility.

How did three actors of this caliber read this script and think it was a good idea? To me, that will forever be the central mystery to The Little Things. Never mind who the killer really is. Denzel Washington utters the phrase, more than once: “It’s the little things, that’ll get you caught.” We’re meant to take that line in as particularly meaningful, except it never pays off, in any sense. This is a movie that feels unpolished, unfinished, and still easily forgotten.

Overall: C+