The Little Things is pulpy and ridiculous and requires some major suspension of belief, but — if you didn’t know any better — you might even say it’s beautiful.

In the absence of a clean ending, then, what's left is the familiar intrigue of smart men squinting dolefully at distant horizons and bloodied crime scenes, an ocean of bottled-up feeling, and a movie that takes a good half of its secrets to the grave.

Especially in its upending, pivoting-away-from-crime norms, morally ambiguous ending, Hancock’s picture reveals itself to have much more on its mind than expected, and becomes a thoughtful meditation on the rigors of police work and the psychic toll that it takes on the soul.

It’s got an interesting structure — it’s not just about catching a killer but also about revealing Deke’s story. But it ultimately suffers for that, the dueling narratives not blending together so much as competing. Of course, you could do worse than watch actors like Washington, Malek and Leto work. But at the end of The Little Things, you feel like you could do better, too.

To enjoy the film on its own cookie-cutter terms depends on finding pleasure, guilty or otherwise, in tropes recycled with total straight-faced conviction. Or maybe to crave comfort food of a variety Hollywood doesn’t churn out quite as frequently as it used to.