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I don’t want to get ahead of myself but the existence of James Ashcroft’s “The Whisper Man,” a three-star serial killer thriller with an all-star cast and a portentous attitude, can only mean one thing: The 1990s are back, baby! Yeah!
So put on your Hammer pants, crank up the Ace of Base and get ready to watch the latest movie in the vein of “Jennifer 8,” “Knight Moves,” “Desperate Measures” and eh, let’s say “The Bone Collector.” If you’re wondering why I didn’t mention “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Se7en” or “Copycat,” all I can say is we didn’t get that lucky. “The Whisper Man” is solid but it’s hardly a diamond.
“The Whisper Man” stars Adam Scott as Tom Kennedy, a crime thriller novelist who moves back to his hometown after his wife dies. Tom’s eight year-old son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) is a sensitive soul, and sees a mysterious girl in a blue sweater wherever he goes. His father doesn’t think this is important. You’d think after writing all those airport novels he might notice when he’s living inside one.
Decades earlier, Tom’s estranged father Pete Willis (Robert De Niro), was a detective who apprehended a serial killer called The Whisper Man. The murderer is still in prison but the murders have somehow begun all over again, so that’s not good. When the new Whisper Man abducts Jake, Tom reluctantly asks Peter to return to the case. They team up with Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan) to tie up the loose ends of a mystery they thought was already solved.
James Ashcroft recently directed “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” starring Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow, which was one of the more ghoulish and impressively-acted thrillers in recent memory. This time he’s got a bigger ensemble but the material isn’t as juicy. Only Michael Keaton and Hamish Linklater, playing potential suspects, were offered any scenery on which to chew. They greedily gobble it up, of course, and no one can blame them, but it would have been polite if they’d left some table scraps for their co-stars.
Adam Scott, best known for his comedic work, dives right into the emotional whirlpool, weaponizing his hard-won cache of lovability to make our hearts break for him. He succeeds. Meanwhile De Niro and Monaghan are so focused on their jobs, in the story and outside of it, that they never come out of their shells. They’re here to catch a killer and do as little introspection and chit-chat as possible. We can admire their work ethic while still wishing we’d gotten to know them better, since it would have made us more invested in both their characters and their work.
Unless you’re watching or reading a mystery by one of the great masters of the genre, there’s a period of time in every whodunnit where the audience isn’t sure if the story is smart yet. “The Whisper Man” spends a lot of time setting up the possibilities, tossing out little details that may or may not be important later, and dumping out giant ice buckets full of bright, vermillion herrings. As we take stock of this whodunnit’s inventory we entertain the possibility that “The Whisper Man” will pull all these pieces together and wow us with its clockwork ingenuity. But we’re also experiencing some impatient dread, as we wait to find out whether the film’s house of cards was built too close to a rotating fan.
It turns out “The Whisper Man” isn’t particularly devious. The solutions to its puzzles range from mildly surprising to disappointingly predictable. If you’re paying close attention you’ll see right though most of its mysteries. Then again the film is a Netflix Original, so they’re wagering you aren’t paying much attention at all. If you’re only half-watching “The Whisper Man” while catching up on your Wordles you could confuse its solemnity with dramatic gravity, or its lack of foolishness with real intelligence. It’s a three-star film with a four-star veneer, but at least parts of it are — please forgive me for getting technical here — super-duper creepy.
“The Whisper Man” doesn’t make space for the thrilling mid-film set pieces this genre usually relies on to periodically build and release tension. Instead Ashcroft keeps the film on a low flame, which eventually cooks the steak but denies his audience the delectable, crunchy sear which transforms acceptable dishes into mouth-watering treats. It’s just one of the many problems “The Whisper Man” has that don’t make it bad but do prevent it from being great.
“Not bad” isn’t, by definition, a bad thing, and “The Whisper Man” can get by on it. This is a welcome throwback to a genre that didn’t so much die, it just stopped getting the royal treatment. Oh, how we long for an era when we could take films like “The Whisper Man” for granted, instead of thanking our lucky stars that an above-average serial killer thriller with a respectable cast was made at all.
