'The Little Things' has its few small pleasures

I like my Denzel Washington characters to have swagger. My favorite roles of his in movies like Malcolm X, Training Day, Inside Man and American Gangster give him a chance to look and be cool, and most importantly, look like he's enjoying himself on screen. But for some reason he has had a tendency to gravitate toward schlubby sad sacks who are haunted by the past.

Not that he doesn't play these parts well, too. In The Little Things, a dour, brooding crime drama he's a somewhat disgraced former detective turned sheriff who is for relatively convoluted reasons drawn into a case that is eerily similar to the one that initially derailed his career. So far, so good, but also a little routine.

He forms an at first uneasy alliance with an up-and-coming detective played by Rami Malek. It's odd seeing an inherently oddball actor like Malek play an earnest family man and a dogged professional. I kept waiting for him to be revealed as the serial killer they're chasing. But then Jared Leto, looking like a bizzaro world evil Jesus, starts popping up on the periphery of the movie basically wearing a sign that says I'm the killer.

The film, directed by John Lee Hancock (of the underrated The Founder and the eye-roll inducing The Blind Side) could use some David Fincher style or just some kind of unconventionality to kick it up a notch. It does have an excellent minimalist opening  sequence and Washington has some typically dynamic acting moments -- I just wish it added up to a little more.

This serial killer genre has long fallen out of fashion -- but the best ones Seven, The Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac had more of a compelling hook, the crimes themselves were so surreal they stood out and raised the stakes.

Still, it has its small pleasures. Leto is very creepy. His appearance seems slightly altered by subtle prosthetics that are unsettling. And Washington as always remains very watchable. His looks have faded considerably and he's packed on quite a few pounds as he pushes 70, but the spark that has made him one of the great movie stars and actors of his generation remains.

He's shown flashes of his former brilliance in recent films like Fences and Flight, which have been sandwiched in between more forgettable fare. I for one am most excited about his next announced feature -- he's slated to play MacBeth in an adaptation of the Shakespeare play directed by Joel Coen (for the first time working without his brother Ethan).

He can play this sort of slightly eccentric heroic cop in his sleep, which is part of the problem with The Little Things. It's a little too on autopilot for its own good. Had it been a little weirder or more original in might have been more memorable. Even though it has nice ambiguous ending.

Still, it's solid Friday comfort food for a cold, dark night.