Review of The Little Things (2021) by Popculturetoday — 03 Feb 2021

After seeing the heavy marketing push for this film it was impossible for me to say that this film wasn’t on my radar. The Little Things is Warner Bros second movie to release day and date on HBO Max as well as theaters and out of all of these home releases from the past year I can happily say that I’m glad that I didn’t waste my time seeing this in theaters. The Little Things portrayed itself as this suspenseful thrilling crime drama about 2 cops trying to find a Californian serial killer in the 1990’s. With heavy hitting actors like Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto one would expect this to be an amazing film on the same caliber as something like “Seven” or “Zodiac”, but The Little Things does very little to invest the viewer like those films and if anything it made me feel as if I wasted 2 hours of my life for a story that doesn’t even matter by the end.

One would assume that the main focus of the film is trying to catch a serial killer. Well you wouldn’t be completely wrong. Here’s the thing; catching the killer is something that the audience needs to know is the goal of the cops, but that story arc is not the one that the movie wants the viewer to grasp. The film does an amazing job portraying itself as this game of cat and mouse, but ultimately it tries to be a character study. Specifically for the characters of Jimmy, played by Rami Malek, and Deke, played by Denzel Washington. I personally do not have issues with character studies, but when the characters the audience is supposed to follow are bland at best then it is hard to want to feel for them. I was very surprised when I came to the conclusion that the acting in this film was mediocre at best. Denzel and Rami were beyond boring in this film with Jared Leto actually being a great supporting actor. Going into this film I was expecting Oscar worthy performances, but instead I got Tweedledee and Tweedledum trying to solve a case. By the end the case isn’t even solved. You spent 2 hours watching a film hoping to catch this terrible person, but you don’t. It is heavily hinted at who the killer could be, but even then no one can definitely know who it is. The point that the movie is trying to convey is that everyone can be just as bad as the serial killer if you let yourself become that bad. A message that I didn’t need to waste 2 hours of my life to figure out. Ultimately The Little Things offers very little and it is a shame.