| Title | Worst thing you'll see all week: The Little Things |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Movie reviews |
| When | January 31, 2021 |
Stop me if you've heard this one. A haunted older cop on the verge of retirement teams up with a hot-tempered young detective to hunt down a creepy celebrity playing a serial killer who likes a bit of a flourish in his crime scenes..
I’m not a good one for starting movie threads, since I don’t watch trailers. But hey, here’s a trailer for other people to watch:
I’m just excited based on the cast. Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto. I’m not really familiar much with the writer/director John Lee Hancock. I believe he wrote the US constitution maybe?
Oh yes, it starts this Friday at theaters, but also coming to HBO Max simultaneously as port of their year of bringing theatrical releases to HBO Max.
Yay!
Ok…
Aaaaand I’m out. ;)
I’m in for Denzel busting ass.
It was … not good.
Welcome back!
BTW, let me guess: Denzel is a retired serial killer and Jared is his “copycat”, right?
I really enjoyed the first 70 minutes of this movie. Fat Denzel is a remarkable contrast to the Equalizer. I just love how each scene has details that draw you in. I found myself very taken with every bit of this story. And then the story takes a bit of a left turn and becomes something else.
And then near the end, it just does something bizarre. I liked the very ending itself, it’s an interesting idea, but the bizarre thing before that just kind of makes me think this was a wasted potential for a good movie. With the ending I can see what the idea was, but the implementation was poor.
So let’s talk spoilers:
The real killer is still out there, right? The brown car we see being used in the real murders wasn’t used by Jared Leto as far as we saw.
And of course, the bizarre scenes I’m talking about is everything that happens between when Denzel goes to get something from the convenience store, the movie is handed over to some bizarro script that doesn’t fit the rest of the movie, including the horrible “tailing the car” scene that Tom talks about. None of that felt authentic. None of it.
But like I said, I really enjoyed the first hour or so of this movie. Especially the scene where Denzel is driving back up North and sees the open jeep of 3 women and the church. And the scene where he sits down in the morgue next to the dead girl. It was scenes like that really kept me enraptured in the movie. It’s a shame it has such a poor last 40 minutes or so.
@Rock8man, yes, you’re correct about the ending. Jared Leto was just a weird crime enthusiast who, for some reason, pissed off the wrong cop by making him dig random holes – I kept hoping Rami Malek would yell “What’s in the hole???”– and therefore got himself kilt by a shovel to the face. Oops! The big Reveal, such as it is, is that Denzel knows what it’s like to feel bad about making a mistake, and he figures no one is going to miss some creepy bearded rando, so he covers up the crime and tricks Rami Malek into thinking Jared Leto killed the missing girl.
Have you seen The Highwaymen? You should check that out on Netflix. John Lee Hancock is a pretty awful director, but he pulled together enough cool stuff in that movie to make it worthwhile. I think his best work is actually the script for A Perfect World with Kevin Costner back in the 90s. Although I have no idea how that holds up these days.
-Tom
I really don’t want this to be the worst thing I see all week. What else can I watch (that will be even worse) so as to make The Little Things the best thing I’ll see all week?
I wanted to like this movie but that turned out harder than Chinese arithmetic.
I was hoping for old-fashioned movie comfort food but what I got instead was a lot of eye-rolling and oh, c’mon story and performance decisions. And when the end credits rolled I had the same “read the room” reaction that Tom did. I went in with low expectations but still didn’t find it worth the time.
The best thing I can say about it is that it premiered in my living room… pretty much the only reason I gave it a shot.
Did what I think happened in that scene actually happen in that scene? Did Denzel actually reach over and feel Jared Leto’s erection? If so, that was some serious commitment to hands-on police work!
-Tom
Ha! I had the exact same question. That sure seemed to be the implication so I rewound and watched the scene a second time to see what I missed, but it still wasn’t clear. So clumsy. I mean, show us Deke spying the pants-tent or putting his hand on his crotch or something!
And you’re right about the quote unquote car chase too. It was maybe a clever idea to see him circle around the cloverleaf exit and evade capture twice… but the shot coverage and editing was so poorly done. It felt less like suspenseful cat and mouse and more like Deke was stuck in a mirror dimension or a time loop or something.
It made me think of that weird sensation you get when a filmmaker crosses the line and edits together scenes shot from either side of a plane between two interacting points. It’s basic filmmaking 101, so you don’t see it too often, but it’s uniquely disorienting. That whole “cat and mouse” felt like John Lee Hancock forgetting not to cross the line.
-Tom
Yes, totally.
I just don’t think there’s any way to make that highway scene work in an interesting way while staying just with Deke and not showing Sparma’s pov from his vehicle. They should have scrapped that whole scene and found a better idea. Same goes for Deke on the rooftop. Also, everything with Baxter from the ringing payphone to the swimming pool.
I agree that the movie comes off unclear about what it’s trying to do. The main plot starts at the diner with Baxter on his way to the crime scene asking Deke, “Why don’t you ride over with me?” Then it ends with Deke hugging a broken Baxter in the freshly-aerated dirt lot.
So, at its heart, this is just a two-character plot; a sort of father/son love story. Deke is beyond redemption but at least he can pass along his hard-earned wisdom about angels while saving Baxter’s life.
This is not at all the unlikely-partners-catch-the-killer movie I was led to believe I was watching. I think of endings as either a Kiss or a Kill and this sure as hell feels like a movie that will end with a Kill but it ends with a Kiss.
I guess the movie deserves credit for trying to subvert expectations. I’d have a much better opinion of the film if any of it had worked!
That’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed the first half so much. I guess it would have lacked any kind of big twist, but I would have loved it if they had gone through the stake out, and found nothing, and just continued to talk to each other. And Deke revealed his secret to him could have been the ending. It would still end on an uncertain note, not really knowing if Sparma was the killer. The Feds would have taken over the case, and the movie ends.
I genuinely thought, for a moment, when Jared Leto brought up Rami Malek’s family, that they were going to rip off the end of Se7en. Instead, he just kept digging holes. To the point where I started laughing. Probably not the emotion they were going for there. The reveal about the barrette also seemed pretty telegraphed. I think it would’ve been better if they left it vague. But I guess that wasn’t the point.
Overall, even watching it in a post-second-COVID-vaccine-side-effect-fugue-state, I found it meandering and boring.
It really irritated me that they felt the need to make the barrette thing explicit. I got the point, thanks.
