2/5
John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things is a boring and predictable thriller that aims for depth and profundity, but winds up saying nothing and wastes the skills of the perennially excellent Denzel Washington. Like so many serial killer narratives, the film revels in female terror and the images of victimized women, while at the same time privileging white, female innocence – especially evident n the shot the teenage girl driving alongside Washington’s character that inspires him to help solve this series of murders. The script is filled with half-baked dialogue containing references and allusions to moments that have been excised from the film in its many revisions. While Hancock is attempting to craft a weighty meditation in obsession, guilt, and regret, the film keeps our protagonist’s past and motivations such a mystery that we never care about his journey toward redemption. On the mystery side of the equation, details and clues become maddeningly obvious (at one point, a clue’s even written in bold on sandwich board for all to see), until Hancock decides to throw the details out and make up new rules for us to follow as it goes along. Unlike the films noir it seeks to emulate, the film is more steady accumulation of coincidence rather than fate shaping the lives of its characters. Hancock is desperate trying to produce a subtle and nuanced thriller with an ambiguous ending, but the elements just don’t come together.
