The Whisper Man
Writers: Ben Jacoby, Chase Palmer; based on The Whisper Man by Alex North
Director: James Ashcroft
Cast: Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, Adam Scott
Is it a crime for an author to christen their published work with godawful titles? If not: why? In the grand scheme of James Ashcroft’s The Whisper Man, there are worse deeds to consider, namely a series of child kidnappings and murders conducted over decades, generations, and lifetimes; if the movie, which Ashcroft directed from a script by Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer, and adapted from Alex North’s same-named bestseller, bears the minor disgrace of a dumb appellation, at least its justifies itself through its contents. In this, our golden age of true crime, total bullshit crime provides a change of pace from current industry standards.
The Whisper Man — no relation to The Bye Bye Man — is a bona fide throwback where so many films described as such simply aren’t; Ashcroft, through North’s writing, points to a bygone era of airport crime yarns, the kind of commercial-grade and blandly appealing literature seemingly lab-made for the sake of passing the time while waiting to board, waiting for liftoff, floating in the air for several hours, and then, as the descent toward one’s destination begins, waiting yet again to deplane. The story recalls a blueprint that’s specific not only to a genre, but to an era, and fully embraces the efficacy of its formula; creative fiction relies on formulae for a reason, after all, and it’s because they’re good at what they do. They serve a purpose, even if the final product ultimately isn’t purposeful.
To wit, Ashcroft’s perspective on North’s book is absent any real insight into the source, though perhaps that speaks to the source’s level of insight. If you’ve read the original material or not, there’s very little in The Whisper Man that’s likely to surprise you if you’ve read even a single 1990s crime paperback; the quality best primed to take one off their guard is the interplay between its two male leads, being Adam Scott and Robert De Niro, the latter of whom admittedly can mix up good chemistry with just about anybody. The former, meanwhile, is fresh off of a “best of” candidate in the year’s horror cinema, Hokum, where he similarly plays a tortured author pursuing the truth behind a murder most foul.
The difference between these characters is that Tom Kennedy (Scott) writes crime novels as a way of connecting to his father, Peter Willis (De Niro), a retired detective venerated for his work in the 1990s identifying and capturing the serial killer of children known as the Whisper Man. (Hey: that’s the name of the movie.) In The Whisper Man’s (told you!) present tense, a copycat killer emerges and picks up where his predecessor, Frank Carter (Michael Keaton), left off, which includes kidnapping Jake (Acston Luca Porto), Tom’s son. The timing sucks; Tom is recently widowed, and by extension, Jake is recently down a parent. Couldn’t Whisper Man 2.0 have picked a victim with a bit more consideration?
There’s a whole lot of plot jammed into The Whisper Man’s run time, clocking in at just shy of two hours; with all that plot comes a whole lot of story arcs that need resolving by the film’s end. Ashcroft has to engineer a reconciliatory hug between Tom and Peter; he has to find something valuable for Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan), the detective heading up the new Whisper Man’s case, to do in the climax; he has to set up Frank with a relationship of his own, similar to Tom and Jake’s, and Tom and Peter’s, as a foil; he has to squeeze in a jittery Hamish Linklater performance as a connoisseur of serial killers and the weapons they used to do their foul deeds. Dutifully, Ashcroft attends to each of these various micro to macro dramas, and thanklessly, because let’s be real: The Whisper Man isn’t the kind of movie anyone tends to show gratitude for. It exists, it serves a purpose, and there’s little more to the experience than that. You are here to watch Scott panic and De Niro hold the room with little more than a hangdog observational gaze, soaking in all of the immediate details of every space he occupies and every person he speaks to in his revitalized quest to stop the Whisper Man for good and all.
It’s possible that De Niro, 83 years young, brought his own baggage and channeled it into the movie with him; it’s hard to imagine that, over the course of his life and career, he hasn’t hurt a few feelings or fractured a relationship or two along the way. Peter is full of regret for having missed out on chunks of Tom’s youth, which Tom won’t forgive him for; Tom, meanwhile, is a bereaved and anxious mess, which Scott is well-practiced in communicating. He and De Niro make an interesting pair, though “interesting” doesn’t make up for the film’s lurching pacing. In one moment, the story plays like molasses in January, and in another, it zips ahead so quickly that you’ll be forgiven for not absorbing the text.
Maybe that’s okay; there isn’t a whole lot of text to absorb. The Whisper Man is a closed circuit production, where everything connects in the most straight ahead way possible in thematic terms. It’s a film about a father and a son, the son and his own son, and, brace yourselves, a tertiary father-son duo. None of the various authors bother imagining how the motifs presented here could speak through its other elements, leaving, for instance, Monaghan’s character as the odd woman out — Calvin and Hobbes Get Rid of Slimy Girls (G.R.O.S.S.) club made into cinema. The outcome to that full-service thoughtlessness is, in its own way, comforting, in the sense that as bland as the film may be, it’s preferable to the true crime cottage industry. Even Tom knows well enough to write fiction instead of biography; his devotion to a good yarn is, in its own way, inspiring, forget the fact that the movie itself is richly uninspired.
