Primetime opens with a fantastic, voyeuristic sequence in which a 20-something man (Tony Revolori) shows up at a suburban house to hook up with a 13-year-old girl he met online. The scene plays from a variety of angles, from cameras hidden throughout the house. As the awkward, uncomfortable moment becomes loaded with sexual intent, a clean-cut, well-dressed man suddenly emerges from behind a curtain. With a smooth interviewer voice, he asks the creeper why he is there and what his intentions are, then begins a dramatic reading of the explicit messages exchanged between the man and the girl. The man, unsurprisingly, decides to flee and is surrounded by cops as soon as he steps out the door.
As someone who was completely unfamiliar with the mid-2000s show To Catch a Predator, this setup seemed too bizarre to be true. But indeed, Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hansen found his own fame with this sensationalized true-crime/reality-show hybrid, which targeted men online who were interested in tween boys and girls for sex—except they didn’t know they were actually chatting with a TV crew intending to entrap them on camera.
Director Lance Oppenheim has, until now, worked in the realm of documentaries. Primetime is his first foray into narrative film, and it’s an intriguing choice considering what unfolds. Primetime reveals how the show became its own media sensation not just for its questionable methods, but for a horrific event that unfolded right on camera, in no small part because of the increasingly reckless tactics of Hansen and the show’s producer.
As ratings-hungry Chris Hansen, Robert Pattinson holds the entire film together with a terrific, oily performance. He’s a jittery, sweaty, fame-hungry reporter who stares with simmering jealousy at the TV whenever his respected network colleague Stone Phillips is onscreen. Predator may not be respected (the network head says he kind of hates it), but Hansen is thrilled that his grotesque, perversely watchable show is a ratings winner. The more successful his show becomes, the more his home life seems to be falling apart (and he is to blame).
Skyler Gisondo plays “Decoy Dan,” an earnest young actor excited about his first real acting gig, who is literally faced with a creeper dropping his pants and applying whipped cream to his member within seconds of being on camera for the first time. Dan is probably the only truly sympathetic character in the movie, and Gisondo gives him a sweetness that is heartbreaking to see dulled by the sleazy and, frankly, completely unsafe environment he is thrown into by Hansen and the show’s producer, Andie.
The always-great Merritt Wever plays producer Andie. As the story evolves, her supporting role reveals a complexity of motives that is fascinating to see unfold but is never given room to breathe. Wever does her best to make Andie complex, but I couldn’t help thinking that if Andie and Hansen’s characters had been given equal weight, it would have made the movie richer.
Primetime is always gripping, in no small part because it’s clear that the production crew has basically gone vigilante. Entrapment of creepers and criminals has always been a squishy area of law enforcement. When you throw in the fact that those luring the bad guys are a TV crew looking for ratings, the ethics of the whole situation get even murkier.
But by portraying Hansen as a desperate-for-ratings journalist who is on the verge of a meltdown in his personal life, the movie seems to give him an out for what unfolds. Later, when I watched clips of Hansen’s real-life shows, he seemed to be a much less flamboyant character. Making Hansen loopy, in a way, seems to give him excuses for a series of very bad choices.
The true story behind this true-ish adaptation—the story is based on Luke Dittrich’s 2009 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die”—is actually even stranger. What unfolds in the film is shocking, but the legal failures surrounding the crew’s methods were another kind of tragedy. Predator‘s tactics, meshing tabloid TV and true crime while allowing law enforcement standards to take a backseat, made the whole thing an ethical mess. Delving deeper into the ramifications of the show’s methods, beyond the tragedy at the center of this film, would have given the story even greater impact.
