Primetime: Robert Pattinson Delivers Every Kind of Acting in This Messy Look Back at Skeevy TV Justice

 By Chris Knight

Rating: B-

In the reality-based Primetime, Robert Pattinson returns to the vampiric roots of his Twilight breakout, though in this case you can substitute “TV ratings” for “human blood.”

Looking far more grizzled than his actual 40 years, Pattinson stars as Chris Hansen, Dateline NBC correspondent and host of To Catch a Predator, a problematic mid-2000s reality-TV series in which online pedophiles were lured into camera-infested traps.

The film opens with one such takedown, aided by Del (Phoebe Bridgers), who is youthful and androgynous enough to play a young girl or boy as needed.

We also meet Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring actor seemingly tricked into his “Decoy Dan” role. (“I think it’s mostly improvisational,” he tells a friend after his audition.) Watching his transition from innocent, fresh-faced 23-year-old to sting operator is one of the most interesting arcs in this messy movie.

Hansen is the face (and the voice, with his “have a seat” catchphrase) of To Catch a Predator, but the screenplay by Luke Dittrich, who also had a producing credit on last year’s same-topic documentary Predators, keeps wandering away from that central role.

So, the focus shifts for a while to Dan, then to ambitious producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), who is being headhunted by a rival network for the show What Would You Do? And then to Xavier (Matthew Maher), the computer guy who DMs perverts until Dan or Del takes over the real world, and the trap is sprung.

It would be interesting to see the full effects of this kind of work on the lives of the people doing it. Xavier’s job recalls Patton Oswalt’s role in the 2022 film I Love My Dad, where he winds up catfishing his own son. And Hansen’s desire to catch “the best of the best” (actually the worst of the worst) is reminiscent of Jake Gyllenhaal’s astonishing performance in 2014’s Nightcrawler as an ambulance-chasing freelance journalist.

But director Lance Oppenheim, who has called Primetime “more of a fever dream than a conventional biopic,” never quite plumbs the dark depths reached by either of those films. A supremely creepy scene of Hansen waking his two pre-teen sons to proudly show them a recent episode of To Catch a Predator exists in a vacuum, the family dynamic never revisited except in an intriguing but vague father-son dynamic between Hansen and Dan.

Similarly, Hansen’s infidelity (with appropriately aged women, it must be noted) could serve as a sharp counterpoint to his own gotcha journalism when the National Enquirer threatens to publish the story. Instead, it registers as a mere annoyance, his marital harmony already in tatters.

The film has much going for it, including lighting design that borders on the horror genre — literal shots of spooky faces in unlit rooms, and a climactic dark and stormy night — and period-appropriate stock that makes everything look grainy and washed out, like a VHS cassette left in the back seat of your car.

Pattinson, meanwhile, produces a Cuisinart-worthy range of emotions, Joker-esque one moment, deadpan the next, Shatnerian in his halting cadence or weirdly self-important, as when he calls the number on a busted vending machine, introducing himself to the bored customer service rep as “Chris Hansen, from Nightline.” Also fun to watch him wield his 2006-era slider phone like a switchblade.

But these are mere vignettes and affectations, and the movie doesn’t do enough to tie them together into a coherent whole. “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Hansen wonders after a pivotal sting goes south. I don’t need Primetime to spoon-feed me the answer; I just wish it had kept up its side of the conversation a little better. 

Primetime. Directed by Lance Oppenheim. Starring Robert Pattinson, Skyler Gisondo, and Merritt Wever. Opens Sept. 25 in cinemas.