'The Little Things' review: Moody but unsatisfying crime drama

Kern County sheriff’s deputy Joe Deacon used to be one of the best cops in Los Angeles, but when he walks back into the station, in October 1990, nobody is glad to see him. Bad juju follows Deacon, known as Deke, and the sooner he’s gone, the better. But Sergeant Jim Baxter, a young hotshot, magnanimously invites the older cop to ride along to a murder scene. Well, what a coincidence: "We got a similar case up north," says Deke.

It’s a promising start to "The Little Things," an unexpectedly brooding noir from writer-director John Lee Hancock, who is better known for uplifting fare ("The Blind Side," "Saving Mr. Banks"). With two fine actors in the lead roles — Denzel Washington as the haunted Deke, Rami Malek as the impeccably-dressed Baxter — the movie aspires to be the kind of grown-up, thematically resonant crime drama that Hollywood once made so effortlessly. Here and there during its two-hour running time, it succeeds.

What pulls us through is Washington’s haunted, world-weary Deke. He’s older but wiser, down but not out, haunted by a series of murders that have only continued in his absence. ("The Little Things" traffics in familiar sexual sadism but Hancock at least refrains from rubbing our faces in it.) Meanwhile, Malek’s Baxter slowly warms to the cop he initially wrote off as a sad sack.

The killer, Deke comes to believe, is a local handyman named Albert Sparma, played with greasy hair and slimy smile by Jared Leto. With the introduction of this beatific creep, a movie that already felt vaguely familiar begins to reveal its influences clearly: We’re in David Fincher territory. Two of Fincher’s masterpieces — the curdled thriller "Seven" (1995) and, to a lesser extent, the fatalistic mystery "Zodiac" (2007) — seem to have inspired a great deal of Hancock’s film, from the malodorous apartment of a murder victim to the lonely California hinterlands where standoffs and showdowns take place.

"The Little Things" unfolds at a steady, confident pace that suggests something momentous is coming. (Thomas Newman’s dreamy piano score gives us a few shivers along the way.) Just as the final act begins, however, "The Little Things" unravels. Deke, the conscientious cop, suddenly turns sloppy; Baxter, the coolest of customers, allows emotion to completely cloud his judgment. In other words, Hancock has to manipulate his characters into giving us the dramatic ending he has preconceived. "The Little Things" occasionally delivers the pleasures of a deep, dark noir, but it’s mostly just a shadow of other films.