Robert Pattinson acts as judge and jury in his latest movie, ruthlessly meting out a brutal brand of vigilante justice. But no, it’s not the long-awaited sequel to “The Batman.” He stars in “Primetime,” an independent film that casts Pattinson not as the Caped Crusader but as former “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen.
In the show, which aired on NBC from 2004-2007, Hansen used a hidden camera to expose and shame men who chatted with what they thought were adolescents online for the purpose of meeting for sex. The confrontations made for gripping television, while fanning fears about pedophiles hiding in plain sight.
While Pattinson nails Hansen’s look, voice and unctuous manner, he never really gets under his skin.
As “Primetime” shows, “To Catch a Predator” became a media sensation. But the need to keep upping the ante for an audience that becomes numb to outrages meant pushing ever harder for “shocking” encounters. Small wonder the movie’s plot (and consider this a small spoiler) is derived from a magazine article about a 2006 sting that went tragically awry.
In that sense, the subject matter remains timely because of what the movie has to say about the media’s willingness to feed society’s basest appetites. However distasteful “To Catch a Predator’s” role was in that equation, the film doesn’t spare those who watched the show for their part in supporting such a program. Rather, as The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin put it, the movie makes them “grubbily complicit” in the show’s excess.
Practically speaking, it’s a shrewd choice career-wise for Pattinson, who continues to oscillate between blockbusters like Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and smaller-boned fare. “Primetime,” directed by Lance Oppenheim, falls squarely into the latter bucket. But though the film received an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, that level of applause feels overstated.
Part of the problem is that while Pattinson nails Hansen’s look, voice and unctuous manner, he never really gets under his skin; rather, Hansen comes across as a caricature of the wildly ambitious, amoral striver who will do anything for ratings. As portrayed here, the character owes a spiritual debt to Faye Dunaway’s ratings-obsessed executive in “Network,” a movie that looks ever more prescient 50 years later.
Movies based on true stories inevitably take dramatic liberties in the pursuit of larger truths, and this one is surely no exception.
Because he’s unburdened by a conscience, Hansen almost becomes a secondary player in terms of the film’s central quandary. That part of the story falls to a struggling young actor (Skyler Gisondo) hired to play a teenage decoy on the show, grappling with just how desperate he is to get his Screen Actors Guild card.
For the Hansen we see in “Primetime,” anything goes when competing in the ratings wars. “Nothing I do is acting,” he tells the actor he nicknames “Decoy Dan,” even though we see Hansen earnestly rehearsing his confrontational lines. (In a meta wrinkle, Jeff Zucker — who ran the network at the time — plays himself as the NBC executive egging Hansen on.)
“Primetime” premieres in theaters almost exactly a year after a sobering documentary on the same topic. That film, “Predators,”addressed the show’s unsettling legacy, which included inspiring copycats to stage their own online sting operations designed to out pedophiles.
As “Predators” Director David Osit said when the film was released, while the show provided a surreal window “into the end of someone’s life as they know it,” there was no discernible effort to address solutions, but rather just a mix of “schadenfreude and horror.” One need not harbor any sympathy for the men involved to feel uneasy about turning the moment when they realize their lives have been ruined into entertainment.
Although many law enforcement agencies eagerly participated in the stings, the dynamic didn’t sit well with all of them. In the documentary, John Roach, a former district attorney, recalls saying, “We’re in the law-enforcement business, not show business.”
“Primetime,” by contrast, is all about show business, and at one point Hansen, clearly relishing his growing fame, is asked if he wants to beat up men caught in his web. He thinks for a moment, then responds that what he does is “worse.”
That observation seems demonstrably true — and more disturbing given the commercial incentive baked into the public shaming. Since “To Catch a Predator” went off the air nearly 20 years ago, Hansen has remained unapologetic — continuing to champion the sting operation formula via his TruBlu website and decrying “Primetime” as an exaggerated work of fiction.
Movies based on true stories inevitably take dramatic liberties in the pursuit of larger truths, and this one is surely no exception. Whatever its flaws, though, “Primetime” does leave a strong impression and captures how “To Catch a Predator” helped beget its own kind of vigilanteism, just minus the masks and capes.
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