Primetime movie review: Robert Pattinson thriller asks big questions, answers none - The Indian Express

Primetime movie review: The real Chris Hansen is not happy. Primetime, which is based on Hansen’s successful but short-lived TV show To Catch a Predator, is “a complete work of fiction attached to a real name”, Hansen has said. The filmmakers have acted in an “exploitative or predatory manner”, he says.

Irony hardly has it this good. To Catch a Predator involved Hansen and producers baiting paedophiles using adult actors who pretended to be children as decoys, and then filming them, following which police swooped in to arrest the men. Police were often in the loop, for their own reasons. The show that ran between 2004 and 2008 on NBC ended abruptly when one of the “targets” shot himself on camera.

Documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim bathes Primetime in grainy, dark lighting, shifting between the film and the TV show within it continuously, in a relentless, rather performative effort to show that he treats all this very solemnly.

What “all this” is, though, is a different matter.

Is this a comment on the media, on the voyeuristic nature of reality TV, on the price of success, or on the headiness of being seen as a vigilante? Oppenheim hints at everything without really making a convincing argument about anything. The stylistic flourishes the film resorts to in aid of this high-minded effort seem self-aggrandizing.

Robert Pattinson does unlikeable well, despite his good looks. And here he really digs his teeth in. His Hansen is a work of oily insincerity and insecurity, who has convinced himself that he is doing the right thing and talks about a fantastical past in India, which may or may not be true. But, Pattinson’s one-tone performance has no depth.

Merritt Wever gets little to do except wring her hands as the producer of To Catch a Predator, who has an increasingly egomaniacal and unpredictable star at hand. How her character Andy landed the gig, which may be headed for prime time history, is hard to imagine.

Skyler Gisondo plays Dan, the actor being used as a decoy to catch various men. He hopes this is his foot in the door to do bigger stuff, but has growing doubts about playing a 13-year-old for a few minutes in every episode, before Hansen walks in and “catches” the predator.

Primetime also ends on a very dubious note, dodging the questions of who pays when a TV show goes too far and where to draw the line.

But then there has been hardly a dip in Hansen’s own career graph. He has won several awards and continues to run a true-crime streaming network and to investigate online predators.

That says a lot. Given its ambiguity over what it wants to say, Primetime chooses silence.

Primetime movie director: Lance Oppenheim Primetime movie cast: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Matthew Maher, Phoebe Bridgers Primetime movie rating: 2.5 stars