I get it. I want to start this review by clarifying that I totally get it. A crime thriller that stars Adam Scott and Michelle Monaghan doesn't seem like a great prospect. And when you have credited roles for both Robert De Niro and Michael Keaton, it's safe to assume that neither of those bigger names will be breaking a sweat. Add to that the fact that this was released straight to a streaming platform with little to no fanfare and you may have already decided to give it a miss.
Despite everything going against it, The Whisper Man isn't actually that bad. It's all about a series of child abductions and deaths that replicate the M.O. of the titular killer. The odd thing is that the killer (Michael Keaton) is in prison. He was put there by Peter Willis (De Niro), a retired cop haunted by that case. But Willis ends up back in action when his grandson (Jake, played by Acston Luca Porto) becomes a target. This leads to Willis struggling to repair some broken bridges with his own son, Tom (Scott), as they work hard with the lead officer on the case, Amanda Beck (Monaghan), to find Jake before the clock runs out.
While I haven't read any of his books so far, I am aware of Alex North, the writer of the source material used here. I've also seen a few other things written by Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer, who have both had varying degrees of success with some big properties. A lot of people celebrated director James Ashcroft for his previous outing (The Rule Of Jenny Pen), although I was a bit cooler on it than most, but he somehow feels like a much better fit this time around. He clearly knows his way around the tropes of the crime thriller, he introduces one or two supernatural elements in a way that doesn't unbalance the whole thing, and he's happy enough to occasionally pay homage to the title that arguably casts the longest shadow over the modern examples of this sub-genre (The Silence Of The Lambs, of course).
Scott and Monaghan both do fine in their roles, but they're both very much a step down from the bigger names they sometimes have to share screentime with. Scott suffers a bit more, considering how this role hews very close to someone he played in a much better movie from earlier this year. Keaton gets to swagger and exude the kind of menace and confidence that he can do so well, and his Whisper Man is an interesting addition to the overstuffed collection of movie serial killers we've had throughout the decades. It's De Niro who proves to be a pleasant surprise though, giving a performance that at least feels as if he's not just sleepwalking through something that has been pinned on the coat-tails of his past glories. He's both vulnerable and determined throughout, and his complicated relationship to the case, and the killer, provides a number of the more interesting moments in the film. Young Porto does well enough, Hamish Linklater gets to overact in a couple of main scenes, and Owen Teague is impressively unnerving when he finally gets to be front and centre in the tense and dark third act.
If you think you might like this then you're probably right. The 111-minute runtime goes by quickly enough, it tries hard to distract you from the more implausible moments, and there's a feeling of real threat to the main characters throughout. This isn't a cosy and slick thriller that you know everyone will survive. It's nothing new, but it does well with the familiar trappings of the sub-genre, and it might even win over those who, like me, skimmed some of the plot and casting details and assumed the worst.
7/10
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