I swear, Adam Scott is capable of playing someone other than a writer in a movie. 😂 First it was in Hokum and now in The Whisper Man. But then I found out this movie is actually based on a novel so I guess it wasn’t exactly the producer’s choice. Anyway, this one was such a doozy. So much star power but the movie and story was just a slog. I mean, it’s obvious what they tried to do with the whole child kidnapping thing but this movie just felt like something straight out of the late 90’s or early 2000’s. Everything about it just felt so cliche and uninspired.

Is The Whisper Man a bad movie? Not exactly. But that’s not to say it’s a good nor memorable one as well. So we have a child kidnapper/killer on the loose. We have a hard-working detective looking into the cases and she’s stumped. Surprise, surprise. Meanwhile, we have the all-too-familiar dad and son moving into a new house to escape some past trauma. It’s always a new house. Always. Of course, the kid gets kidnapped one day and the dad is forced to work with the detective to bring his son back home. I mean, that’s kind of it. Throw in a Robert De Niro just because he’s frigging Robert De Niro and you got yourself a typical movie of this sort. The movie takes place in 2026, so it’s very recent but yet again, the movie just has that classic vibe and feel to it, like straight out of the early 2000s era. Not sure if that was planned or not but that’s the feeling I got.

So, on to the killer. I mean, what is going on here? The kidnapper’s whole signature to lure kids away is a kiddie rhyme—something about tapping on the glass or window and shit? Then we find out he doesn’t even need to physically kidnap his victims; they just walk out on their own. He specifically picks victims who actually want to get away from their parents. I mean, OK, I can see that, but the whole whispering thing is pretty lame in execution. And of course, in the end, we discover that the kidnapper has daddy issues. I mean, come on, guys. Is there no other novel Netflix could find that’s a bit more original than this to turn into a film?

Ultimately, I don’t know what this movie accomplishes in the end. Sure, there’s always the fact that parents have the incredibly stressful duty of raising children without needing to know that a child-rhyming, whispering creep in the neighborhood is out there waiting to prey on them. But as a movie, The Whispering Man fails to really heighten that fear and paranoia in us. And what the hell went on with that collector dude? Bro just literally stabbed and killed himself when he was being investigated. Ten seconds ago, he literally said he wanted to lawyer up. All he had to do was STFU and yet in the next scene, he’s spilling everything to the detectives by himself. Oh, that’s right, he admitted to killing someone, and of course he kept the frigging weapon in his collection. 🙄 🙄 Yeah, anyway, this movie was just weak overall. The cast did their job, but everything just felt so uninspired and dull. What I can say is that a Adam Scott and Robert De Niro collab is not what I had on my bingo card.