Direction: John Lee Hancock
Country: USA
The director of Saving Mr. Banks (2013), John Lee Hancock, imagines a neo-noir police thriller that teams up Denzel Washington as an experienced, obsessive deputy sheriff from Kern County and Rami Malek as a serious young Sergeant from the L.A. Police Department. Both are fixated on catching an insidious serial killer who mutilates young women for sexual pleasure without raping them. The investigations lead to a solitary local suspect, a crime-buff (Jared Leto) called Albert Sparma who adopts a confrontational behavior whenever challenged.
The film lingers on a great deal of hanging between the cops, dragging the story for too long. All the same, when the final comes, it just certifies a watered-down marriage between duty and personal conflict, in a film that fails to live up to its shadowy premise. Never transcending, The Little Things pretends to be more than it is, and that pretense comes aggravated by the fact that its conclusion is stale and the process that leads to it remains hardly entertaining.
Rather than conventionalizing procedures, Hancock should look for his filmmaking identity in the first place.
