In Primetime, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen bristles when asked whether a bracelet on his wrist is an “acting totem.” No, snaps the man whose television series offered recurring stings of would-be child sex predators. He is never acting, Hansen insists; he is cleansing the world of “the most ancient evil.”
And yet he is the hardest-working actor in Primetime, preening and rehearsing his on-air lines over and over before showtime. Well, not lines, exactly, but recitations of the most lurid online chats between creepy adult men and decoys posing as children. It is all part of an act that made the real Chris Hansen a TV celebrity in the 2000s, back when he was ambushing would-be predators at their ostensible trysts and serving up his cat-that-ate-the-canary catchphrase: “Why don’t you have a seat right over there?”
It is one of the movie’s sharper ironies that Hansen, portrayed by Robert Pattinson as a self-righteous megalomaniac, denies being an actor even though he has turned the humiliation and arrest of sex predators into must-see TV. By contrast, To Catch a Predator decoy Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) is a struggling actor who tries to ease his troubled conscience by pretending that playing a 13-year-old is just another acting gig.
A less intentional irony is that Primetime shares some traits with the ill-fated series it dramatizes; both are very watchable, a bit sleazy and not nearly as important as they purport to be.
Screenwriter Ajon Singh and director Lance Oppenheim take considerable dramatic license in chronicling the rise and fall of To Catch a Predator. The film opens as Hansen and his producer, Andie (Merritt Wever), learn that NBC is moving their show into a prime-time slot opposite ABC’s Lost. With ratings pressure mounting and his marriage fraying (Anna Faris, wasted in a dishwater-dull role as his wife) Hansen sets his sights on bigger fish. That brings the crew to Murphy, Texas, and an assistant district attorney, Bill Conradt (Alex Winter), who has been engaging in graphic online conversation with someone he believes is a minor. Revealing more wouldn’t necessarily be a spoiler (it’s all a matter of historical record), but suffice it to say that things go south, figuratively and literally.
The film is the narrative-feature debut of Oppenheim, a documentarian whose credits include 2020’s Some Kind of Heaven and this year’s You Can See Everything, the much-ballyhooed doc he co-directed with Nathan Fielder about convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. Primetime is an impressive first foray into dramatization. Cinematographer David Bolen underscores the story’s innate sordidness with a dark, grainy visual scheme. The performances are exemplary. Gisondo, whose “Decoy Dan” hopes the reality-TV gig will earn him admission to the Screen Actors Guild, provides recognizable humanity amid the film’s pervasive cynicism. Even better is Pattinson, who has already delivered remarkable turns this year in The Odyssey and The Drama. His interpretation of Hansen—cocky, insecure, obsessive—is fascinating, but the script renders him impenetrable.
If only the movie matched Pattinson’s intensity. Primetime raises meaty issues, weighing the ethics of entrapment against the obvious benefit of ferreting out child sex predators. Hansen proclaims that the show simply ensures that “a man must be accountable for the decisions that he makes,” but what place does moral reckoning have as mass entertainment? And what does the immense popularity of To Catch a Predator and its many imitators say about us?
Primetime mostly skims the surface of these questions. There are flashes where it seems interested in digging further, particularly a scene in which a rabbi who has been ensnared by a sting emphatically tells Hansen that he has no right to judge him. The moment passes. In the end, Primetime is content to just have a seat right over there.
Grade: B
Check out the trailer here.
