‘The Little Things’ movie review: Polished genre film, let down by thin central mystery

Despite superb performances by Denzel Washington and Rami Malek, the thriller is a tepid watch

Basic Instinct turns 30 next March. The mother of all erotic thrillers was a love letter to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; the famous interrogation scene notwithstanding. The movie featured a violent murder, a probable murderer in Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) and a disgraced detective, Nick Curran (Michael Douglas). The movie, apart from much R-rated sex and the loveliest costumes, was basically a cat-and-mouse game between Tramell and Curran. . And now here comes The Little Things, a retro thriller set in the early 90s, which features a troubled detective Deke (Denzel Washington), a string of horrific murders, an uneasy partnership with a college-educated detective, Jim Baxter (Rami Malek) and a weird, taunting suspect, Albert Sparma (Jared Leto). All the crime shows we have watched invariably have a detective whose life is torn apart in the chase for the bad guys—we all know Nietzsche’s pithy observation of the abyss staring back at you if you stare at it long enough.