Primetime is a loud, bombastic look at a shoddily produced—and extremely popular—reality TV show program, To Catch a Predator, that helped reshape TV viewing. Your ability to appreciate Primetime depends upon your willingness to ingest something that is, in a word, crazy.
Chris Hansen’s stagey, repetitive TV trap for alleged (and some downright certain) pedophiles blasted onto TV for three years (2004-2007) and met the cancellation hatchet after an episode resulted in a suicide.
Robert Pattinson plays Hansen in a decidedly unflattering way: He’s a sociopath concerned only about the success of his show as his family life crumbles around him. The film re-enacts the feel of some of the earlier, trashier episodes, leading up to that final confrontation with a Texas attorney (played hauntingly by Alex Winter, aka Bill of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure).
Director Lance Oppenheim employs a risky style here, with a distracting soundtrack and cinematography that makes things feel more like a slasher movie than an expose/satire on American TV. The tone is all over the place, but I think that’s intentional—and the approach works most of the time. The idea here is to see the To Catch a Predator show as Hansen saw it—a larger-than-life, all-encompassing entity.
The film suggests Hansen saw his show as, simply, the best show ever made—a grand, stylistic production that had all the guts it needed to go up against those crazy polar bears on Lost. Hansen loses his shit as the movie plays out, and the onscreen proceedings unravel.
Pattinson, who has been in more movies than Pedro Pascal this year, is great in the central role. Whether or not this is a completely accurate re-creation of Chris Hansen doesn’t really matter. The freaky guy he is playing here is forever watchable and scary. Skyler Gisondo steals much of the movie as Dan Plum, aka Decoy Dan, a struggling actor who passes for 13 and is one of Hansen’s major pieces of bait for the creepos. Yes, that is singer Phoebe Bridgers playing another one of the decoys. It took me a second to recognize her.
When I was walking in to take my seat, there was a commercial playing—with the real Chris Hansen assuring the audience that his fight goes on. Hansen apparently bought those ads in an effort to counter his portrayal in the movie, which he sees as a hit job.
I can understand why he’s doing this—because the movie is pretty damning. There is nothing heroic in the way he’s portrayed.