B-movie maneuvers with an A-list cast

    A thriller that evokes memories of other movies about cops and serial killers, The Little Things traffics in downbeat atmospherics with a thriller set in 1990s. 

   Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto star in a story that has been vamped on and recycled so many times, it's difficult to see the movie as more than another genre exercise.

    Looking paunchy, exhausted and gray, Denzel Washington plays Joe "Deke" Deacon, a Northern California deputy sent to LA to retrieve a piece of evidence.  As it turns out, Joe once worked in LA, a city he couldn't escape without tarnishing his reputation.

    Once in LA, Joe teams with Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek), an LA detective with a starched personality and a talent for getting himself on the news. Jimmy asks Joe to join him in trying to solve a string of murders, prostitutes who have been mutilated.

   Enter Albert Sparma (Jared Leto), an LA refrigerator repairman who lives on the margins, walks with a waddle and has enough smarts to make for a tough interview when the cops haul him in for questioning. 

     With long hair that looks as if it hasn't been washed for weeks and a taste for strip clubs, Albert has prime suspect written all over him.

     Washington has an uncanny ability to make us believe that any character he plays knows more than anyone else. He and Malek make a decent enough team, mismatched at first but increasingly on the same page.

     The screenplay creates a predictable thematic link between Joe and Jimmy, building a connection around each's capacity for moral compromise. Joe was suspended from the LA force because he became obsessed with a case that shattered his marriage and put him in the hospital for triple bypass surgery.

     Director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks) turns out a police procedural that peeks into the darkest corners of cop and criminal behavior -- not so much because it's curious but because the atmospherics demand it. 

     Even worse, the story falls short during the final act which finds Jimmy behaving  in ways that defy credibility. 

     The Little Things fulfills many of the requirements of a gritty genre piece, moving its characters through a world from which no one escapes uncorrupted, sort of a B-movie with an A-list cast and noir shading.

       But with three Oscar winners in the principal roles, it's not unfair to have expected something more.

      

The lawmen who caught Bonnie & Clyde

It takes a certain amount of daring to make a movie that’s bound to be compared to a movie that has acquired iconic status among moviegoers. We’re talking Bonnie & Clyde, the 1967 classic starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway and directed by Arthur Penn. Director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side), working from a screenplay by John Fusco, looks at the other side of the equation, the manhunt for two notorious gangsters during the economically depressed 1930s. The Highwaymen focuses on the Texas lawmen (Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson) who tracked and ultimately slaughtered two of American’s most famous criminals. Overly deliberate and nearly suffocated by a heavy emphasis on period trappings, the movie has the self-conscious feeling of a drama that’s steeped in a hard-boiled Texas point-of-view. Of the two actors, Harrelson proves more interesting as the drunken, shattered Maney Gault, a retired Texas Ranger who seems motivated by the need not to deny the violent past he shares with his former partner. As Frank Hamer, Costner invests heavily in the grim-faced seriousness of a man who believes evil must be obliterated. The choice makes sense but eventually proves a bit dull. A Netflix production, The Highwaymen raises interesting questions about the nature of the men who hunt outlaws. Are they any better than those they hunt? The movie, which spends very little time showing Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, also refers to the clash between the old-style lawmen represented by Costner and Harrelson and their younger counterparts. Hancock also exposes the disconnect between the brutality of Bonnie & Clyde, who shot lawmen in the face at point-blank range, and the celebrity they attained. Semi-successful attempts to add dramatic heft -- Hamer's confrontation with Henry Barrow, Clyde’s father (William Sadler), for example -- can be found but the movie's dirge-like tones make it a bit of slog. With Kim Dickens as Hamer‘s wife; John Carroll Lynch as the state official who insisted on involving Gault and Hamer in the chase; and Kathy Bates as Ma Ferguson, the first female governor of Texas and a character who might be worth a movie of her own.

He saw the future: It was hamburgers

Michael Keaton excels in The Founder, the story of how McDonald's became McDonald's.

Everyone knows McDonald's, the ubiquitous hamburger chain. Not everyone knows the story behind one of America's -- and now the world's -- premiere fast-food operations. Founded in 1940 in San Bernardino, Ca. by the McDonald brothers (Mac and Dick), the restaurant revolutionized the drive-in food business by doing away with car hops and anything else that might slow the delivery of burger to customer. The McDonald's slogan: Buy 'em by the bag.

After some meager attempts at franchising, the brothers decided to focus on perfecting their formula.

But in 1954, Ray Kroc entered the brothers' lives. It was Kroc who grew McDonald's into a national phenomenon through an increasingly slick franchise operation.

According to the new movie, The Founder, the brothers were a couple of burger nerds who brought a high ethical standard to their work. Kroc ... well ... not so much.

In The Founder, Michael Keaton gives a terrific performance as Kroc, a man who always seems to be calculating the odds. Kroc doesn't just have ideas; he has bursts of inspiration, and he prides himself on his persistence, which he regards as more important than talent.

Keaton registers Kroc's thoughts with the quickness of a pin ball bouncing off bumpers; he makes Kroc a burger evangelist who understood that no ambition is too grand, and who eventually wrested control of the company from the brothers.

In some other era, an epiphany was something spiritual; as the '50s turned to the '60s, an epiphany shrunk in size. It was the light that dawned in Kroc's eyes when he first saw the San Bernadino McDonald's with its 15 cent hamburgers. You almost can hear Keaton thinking Kroc's thoughts: This, by God, is the future.

At one point, Kroc tells the McDonalds -- beautifully played by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch -- that he envisions McDonald's as part of a small-town trinity: Church (with its cross); town hall (with its flag) and McDonald's with its patented Golden Arches serving as a bridge between the secular and the holy.

Lively direction by John Lee Hancock takes us from Kroc's days selling milk-shake mixers to the peak of his corporate success, which -- of course -- left the McDonald brothers bobbing helplessly in its potent wake.

Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks) understands that few of us go to movies for moral lessons, so he makes sure to entertain. A sequence in which the McDonald brothers perfect their fast-food assembly line by drawing various positions in the McDonald's food chain on a tennis court becomes exactly what one of the brothers calls it, "a burger ballet."

As Kroc ascends the ladder built by his dreams, his ruthlessness becomes clearer; he sheds his first wife (Laura Dern). Before that he meets the woman (Linda Cardellini) who'll become his next wife. Gradually, he grows into the image he has created for himself, and it's exciting to watch Keaton expand Kroc's ego to match his achievements.

In a powerful scene toward the movie's end, Kroc explains to the exasperated Dick McDonald that the thing he most wanted to appropriate from the brothers was their name. He figured McDonald had an all-American ring that forever would elude a man named Kroc. He wound up taking not only their burgers, but their identity.

I can't say that Hancock, working from a screenplay by Robert D. Siegel, has made the Citizen Kane of fast food, but he's made an entertaining movie with enough substance to give you pause.

Let me summarize with something that may sound familiar in these days of ascending Trumpism:
The McDonald brothers were about burgers; Kroc -- in what probably could have been an even tougher movie -- was about being hailed as a conqueror.