REVIEW: Denzel takes back seat in “Little Things”

“The Little Things” needs a little bit more of Jared Leto. Maybe a lot more.

The Warner Bros. Pictures cop drama — debuting this week in theaters and running for a month on WarnerMedia streaming service HBO Max — grabs your attention with its star pairing of Denzel Washington and Rami Malek The two very different but extremely talented and acclaimed actors portray detectives who decide to work together to solve a case involving the killings of several young women.

And yet it is Leto — an Academy Award winner for his supporting role in 2013’s “Dallas Buyers Club” — who greatly elevates the film about halfway through it. His long-haired, generally disheveled character — crime buff and cop antagonizer Albert Sparma — becomes the primary person of interest in the case, and Leto’s performance is by far the most memorable aspect of “The Little Things.”

He helps make the film from writer-director John Lee Hancock earn a lukewarm recommendation — especially for

HBO Max subscribers — even though the slow-burning affair

Denzel Washington and Jared Leto in “The Little Things.” could have used a spark far sooner.

Washington portrays Kern County Sheriff’s Deputy Joe “Deke” Deacon, who, early on in “The Little Things,” is ordered to drive south to visit his old stomping grounds, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Homicide Department, for what should be a routine bit of evidence gathering.

It will prove to be anything but that.

Deke gets pulled into the multiple-murder case being run by a young hotshot, Malek’s Sgt. Jim Baxter. Although the two butt heads early on, Jim witnesses Deke’s investigative chops at a bloody crime scene and endeavors

to pick his experienced brain.

Jim is warned to stay away from Deke, though, by his superior, who hints at why the veteran cop is no longer with the department.

“He’s a rush-hour trainwreck,” says Capt. Carl Farris (Terry Kinney of “Billions”).

The case ties to one from years earlier that still haunts Deke, so he takes vacation time and sticks around Los Angeles, with Jim allowing him to be his unofficial partner on the case.

Although they are at different points in their lives and careers, both men have daughters and want to be avengers for the murdered, and they develop an easy rapport pretty quickly. It helps that Jim feels Deke has plenty to teach him, such as being careful not to overlook even the smallest detail in a case.

“It’s the little things that are important, Jimmy,” Deke says. “it’s the little things that get you caught.”

As it’s the movie’s titular quote, we know it will prove to be important.

However, Albert, even after being tailed by Deke and brought in for questioning, isn’t sweating the small stuff. If anything, he’s enjoying the attention from the cops, being the mouse to their cats. He’s happy to lead them here and there — maybe, even, to a spot where one of the victims is buried.

But for all we — and they — know, he’s innocent. (While we are introduced to the murderer in the film’s tension-filled opening sequence that feels like an homage to the “American Girl” scene from 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” we never are given a clean look at him.) Yet they are convinced in their souls he’s their man, even if they don’t have the evidence to prove it.

Hancock (“The Blind Side,” “Saving Mr. Banks,” “The Founder”) wrote the script for “The Little Things” about three decades ago, “when the theaters were full of buddy cop movies,” he says in the film’s production notes. Hancock and his collaborators decided not to modernize the story, which helps to explain its throwback feel.

Plus, “The Little Things” being set in 1990 allows for both a lack of mobile phones AND the inclusion of payphones. Both influence the narrative, but it also feels as if Hancock could have used the time period to an even greater extent to give the film some needed personality.

Until Leto shows up, it’s all just a bit bland, if appropriately dark and moody given the subject material.

And while Washington (“Training Day,” “Glory”) brings his well-established skills to “The Little Things,” Malek — so sensational in bold TV series “Mr. Robot” and a deserved Oscar winner for 1999’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” — is a strange fit here. In his hands, Jim neither feels quite like a real person nor, just as importantly, someone with whom Deke so easily would bond.

Along with the almost-ghostly persona adopted by Leto for Albert, Hancock’s fairly wellcrafted final act helps “The Little Things” finish more strongly than you expect it to in its first half.

Ironically, the film could use a few more little things to keep you invested, but it has a few big ones that prove to be just enough.