In the early 2000s, To Catch a Predator was a national phenomenon that both defined and reflected a post-9/11 zeitgeist built around punishment. Creepy online men would show up to meet teenage boys and girls, armed with cheap beers and rolls of condoms, and Chris Hansen would saunter around the corner to exact the ultimate gotcha. Audiences ate it up. These pedos had earned their fifteen minutes of infamy, and bearing witness to the ritual was how the rest of us helped expunge their evil. That the whole thing required a heavy lure and deep online catfishing was a provocative asterisk, and beside the point: these were inexcusable men who deserved the new-age public square hanging.
Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, adapted from the 2007 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” puts entertainment and vigilante justice in the same frame through Hansen, played with unknowable rigidity by the reliably great Robert Pattinson. Hansen is a journalist by trade, but his aspirations lie in sensationalism. A flashback to his reporting on disappeared children in India unlocks something of his philosophy. He believes evil exists. It’s his duty to see it. And if you see it, it’s your responsibility to carve it out. Or at least that’s the fastest path to an Emmy. His ambitions are mirrored by producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever): To Catch a Predator may be holy work, but better ratings are holier.
It’s hard to parse much internality within a man so focused on becoming the kind of broadcast hero strangers approach on the street to confess their love for. Pattinson plays him as fundamentally inscrutable. And even as Hansen passes his intentions off as benevolent, his methods test ethical and legal lines both within and outside the production. There are the decoys, like aspiring actor Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), of-age adults posing as teens, taking the phone calls and beckoning their marks inside where the hot seat awaits. And then there are the marks, and the aggressive tactics used to lure them over.
Hansen and his team have few qualms about the extremes required to get a would-be statutory rapist through the door. It’s an idea the documentary Predators, also released this year, digs into more deeply: when an adult man posing as a child actively promises fantastical sexual experiences and repeatedly encourages a potential predator to come over, at what point does exposure begin to resemble entrapment? That’s not to excuse the behavior. It’s deplorable and disgusting, full stop. But it complicates the clean moral equation that made To Catch a Predator so satisfying to watch. Hansen likes to repeat one question to himself: “What would have happened if I weren’t here?” What indeed?
[READ MORE: Our review of ‘The Drama‘ directed by Kristoffer Borgli and starring Robert Pattinson]
How many of these encounters were manufactured? If you chum the waters enough, isn’t a shark eventually inevitable? How much damage did the crew inflict against what it prevented? Oppenheim’s film begs us to consider all of it, then doesn’t push. Ajon Singh’s screenplay grounds us inside the story through Hansen, Andie, and Dan, but never penetrates deeply enough into any of them to land much emotional impact. And while the movie is rarely boring, its retelling of events feels strangely uninspired, lacking the propulsion that made the series, and the conversation around it, such an event. Interrogating the meaning of the moment, Primetime keeps losing sight of the moment itself.
Oppenheim has a strong sense of period. The grainy film stock and the clips of contemporaneous TV, Lost and its ilk, drop us convincingly into the early aughts, and the show-within-the-show footage is staged with a queasy fidelity to the real thing. The cast does the rest. Pattinson offers a pitch-perfect Hansen impression, but something keeps us at arm’s length from the man, muting the impact of the performance. Wever is effective as the workmanlike producer weighing her own professional aspirations against the risk of association with a shady character presenting himself as a knight in shining armor. Gisondo is the closest thing the movie has to a moral compass, and his reactions to both the depravity of the men he’s staged to meet and the honey traps laid by his own crew provide the most emotionally resonant moments here.
Across its brief run, To Catch a Predator offered a kind of moral wish fulfillment. Shows like Cops had long given audiences bad guys breaking the law, but here was something more intimate and perversely satisfying: a front-row seat to the moment a sexual predator realized the entire world was about to know exactly who he was. Something seductively simple about tuning in to watch evil exposed, humiliated, and hauled away.
[READ MORE: Our review of ‘The Batman‘ directed by Matthew Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson]
But moral simplicity like that requires staging. Production. Editing. A mark placed in exactly the right chair and Chris Hansen waiting just offscreen for his cue. Primetime understands that the machinery complicated the righteous fantasy it was selling, but never turns the observation outward toward the millions of us who happily consumed it. The more interesting question isn’t what Hansen was willing to do for ratings. It’s why we found watching him do it so satisfying. If only Primetime pointed that mirror back at us with the same mercilessness Hansen once reserved for the men sitting across from him.
CONCLUSION: ‘Primetime’ transports us back to the early aughts, when Chris Hansen and the ‘To Catch a Predator’ crew dominated the airwaves. Lance Oppenheim’s film digs into the nasty business behind catching predators and the questionable morals of Hansen’s methodology. But for all its visual confidence and a first-rate cast, it never feels all that revelatory or essential.
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By: Matt Oakes
Matt Oakes is the founder and editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot. A Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes, he’s a founding member of the Seattle Film Critics Society and a member of the Online Film Critics Society. He started writing about movies in college, when the university paper wouldn’t have him, and has been reviewing ever since, covering festivals like Sundance and SIFF along the way. He has a soft spot for horror movies that make him die a little inside, a healthy skepticism of film Twitter’s consensus favorites, and a philosophy degree he swears is relevant. He’s based in Seattle.
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