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The second is Jared Leto, bearded and coiffed like the Messiah, in the role of a dude named Albert Sparma. The first is Malek, who seems, as usual, to have beamed down recently from Betelgeuse and not yet nailed his earthling disguise. And it’s fun to see Washington square off against a brace of performers who could not resemble him less in bearing and tone. Nonetheless, there are pleasures to be had, not least in a sumptuous crane shot-the camera inspecting a suspect vehicle, and the red lights on its tail, then ascending to a view of the city and the slow fade-in of dawn. Nothing so fine emerges from Hancock’s movie, whose plot, in the home stretch, attains a level of implausibility with which even Washington may be unfamiliar. Not merely still in himself, he is the cause of stillness in others.

He is tongue-tied, yet they stop to listen. In “Glory” (1989), for which Washington won his first Oscar, we see him, as a young private in a Black regiment during the Civil War, addressing his fellow-soldiers on the eve of battle. His smile is bestowed like a blessing (watch him grin at a young woman in a convertible, in “The Little Things,” as she sails by on the freeway), and, when presented with material that is worthy of his gifts, he takes immediate command. Nor is he hurried, either in his line readings or in his lordly stroll, by the demands of vengeful action. Elsewhere” ended its run, in 1988, he reserves himself for cinema, and though many of his films, like the time-hopping “Déjà Vu” (2006), are rankly absurd, he is never humiliated by hogwash. He is one of the few remaining stars to whom we look for nobility. Washington is the only actor we got, I reckon, who can get away with this stuff. Down at the morgue, he converses with a corpse, saying, “You can talk to me. Lying on the bed in darkness, in a cruddy hotel room, he gazes at images of the victims tacked up on the wall. He is of a rarer breed-the investigating mystic, self-schooled in criminal divination. on an errand, he is invited by his successor, Jim Baxter ( Rami Malek), to tag along on a fresh case-the slayings of several women-and to lend his expertise.ĭeke, you understand, is not one of those standard-issue sleuths who are contented with fingerprints and blood types. He’s a rush-hour train wreck.” So says one of his former colleagues, and the job of “The Little Things” is to put Deke back on the tracks. “Got a suspension, a divorce, and a triple bypass, all in six months. The year is 1990, and Deke is a deputy sheriff in Kern County, California, but five years earlier he was part of a homicide squad in Los Angeles. The film stars Denzel Washington as Joe Deacon, known as Deke.

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Instead, it’s a cop drama about a serial killer, decked out with the customary frills: murders you commit together, clues you try to fit together, ways to get your shit together. There’s a whole potential movie, right there, and I was hoping that the new John Lee Hancock film, “The Little Things,” might be a riff on Sondheim’s acerbic song. He listed some of the things: “concerts you enjoy together, neighbors you annoy together, children you destroy together,” and so on. It’s the little things you do together, as Stephen Sondheim reminded us, in “Company,” that make perfect relationships.

Little things