“The Whisper Man” is the first — and surely not the last — film to be adapted from the airport oeuvre of British crime novelist Steve Mosby, who since 2019 has written four books (including the source text here) under the pseudonym Alex North. If he didn’t choose that nom de plume to evoke Alex Cross, the detective hero of multiple comparable James Paterson thrillers and their adaptations, then consider it a helpful coincidence. On screen, “The Whisper Man” certainly assists the parallel: As you’re watching, it’s easy enough to mentally recast it with Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd, and to imagine exactly the kind of pretty-entertaining Nineties potboiler that would have been. This 2020s version is pretty entertaining too: Now it’s Netflix fodder rather than multiplex filler, but it passes a couple of hours just as serviceably.
There isn’t even a drastic generational shift between that imaginary cast and this film’s actual one. In place of Freeman we have Robert De Niro, imparting grizzled gravitas without putting in a whole lot of noticeable effort as a former detective drafted into a grim serial-killer investigation, with marked similarities to a case he solved decades ago; in place of Judd we have Michelle Monaghan, ever doughty and determined, as the earnest younger cop trying to follow in his footsteps.
