In a nutshell, Whisper is the movie that Abigail ripped off. It’s also a movie whose main character is a Damien Thorn knockoff and which climaxes with an axe-wielding grown man chasing a little boy through the snow. There is no new thing upon the earth, as Solomon saith.
Career criminals Max (Josh Holloway), Sidney (Michael Rooker), Vince (Joel Edgerton), and Max’s girlfriend Roxanne (Sarah Wayne Callies) kidnap eight-year-old David (Blake Woodruff) and hold him for ransom.
The first night, Roxanne asks Max whether they are “bad people.” Max replies, “There’s no commandment against kidnapping,” and they’re only “borrowing” David anyway. Despite Max’s idiotic answers, the filmmakers undoubtedly expected the audience to believe that Max and Roxanne are in fact not “bad people,” especially when compared to Sidney and Vince.
What makes a kidnapper a good person? According to writer Christopher Borrelli and director Stewart Hendler, it’s the thought that counts. Just wanting to go straight means Max is better than his fellow crooks, never mind that he doesn’t really want it that bad.
One bank refuses to loan Max and Roxanne the money to open their own legit business, and that’s it. Just like that, it’s back to a life of crime. “I’m going to take that job,” Max informs Roxanne.
Not get a job, mind you, because God forbid he should (and she, too) work for a living and, once he has made ends meet, set a little money apart each month. It’s called saving. No, Max is talking about the “job” Sidney offered him (i.e., kidnapping David).
No other alternatives are explored, let alone exhausted. I find it hard to believe that a felony that can get you up to 20 years would be anyone’s second choice (particularly someone who claims to be “done with all that shit”), but I guess that, whatever Max’s virtues may be (and I honestly don’t know), persistence is not one of them. Meanwhile, Roxanne tags along because she’s “good with kids.”
If she truly had David’s best interests at heart, and if she had been serious when she advised Max not to listen to Sidney, she would have tipped the police off. Then again, who could resist Max? When Sidney bites the dust and Vince starts talking about a “bigger share,” Max rules that “Sidney’s share goes to his [unseen, nameless] niece.” What a swell guy!
Things like that are intended to give Max the moral high ground but have the unfortunate effect of making him come across as a hypocrite. For example, turning down a larger payday to make sure that Sidney’s family is well provided for — but then the ill-gotten money doesn’t belong to the niece any more than it did to Sidney or to Max, Vince, and Roxanne.
As it turns out, though, David is some kind of demon whose adoptive mother paid Sidney to have him kidnapped and eventually murdered (why she didn’t just put a hit on him, I haven’t the foggiest). Among other nefarious skills, David can “whisper” to people and make them do awful things to themselves and others. He targets the wicked and the innocent alike, which makes him either twice as good or half as bad as his kidnappers.
If nothing else, the film’s wrongheaded hard-on for painting Max in a good light has the upside of spelling certain doom for David. I hate it when the Creepy Child gets away with murder, like in the nihilistic, immoral, misogynistic Brightburn.
Still, Whisper would have worked better if Max had been a straight-up jerk who bites off more than he thought he could chew and is confronted with a greater evil than himself — like George Clooney in From Dusk Till Dawn.
Had Max openly been a selfish son of a bitch all along, such an uncharacteristic final move as giving up the money entirely (kind of an odd thing to do, considering that by then he had actually earned it) would be much more meaningful. How do we know, however, that this is a genuine indication of a profound, lasting change in Max rather than just another of his empty gestures?
I suppose we’re meant to interpret the fact that Max is able to resist David’s pernicious influence as a sign that he’s no longer the weak-willed individual that we came to know — and we might, were it not that what Max does to overcome David’s “whisper” is fire a gun behind his own head to render himself temporarily deaf, even though it has been established that David can manipulate people remotely and telepathically, even when he has been gagged. D’oh!