Review: Primetime – Why don’t you take a seat?
Directed by Lance Oppenheim
Starring Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers
6/10
Twenty years ago, when reality television was booming and YouTube was still in its infancy, To Catch a Predator was a ratings winner and a cultural phenomenon. Two decades later, we now have Primetime to sum up this peculiar era of American culture, where spectacle and moral righteousness meet (which has now ballooned further with the online sphere). The film manages to at least capture this zeitgeist in a way that is technically astonishing but insubstantial with its characterisation and obvious with its thematic insight.
To Catch a Predator is a hit show presented by Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), working alongside the police team Perverted Justice, who conduct sting operations to lure would-be child sex offenders, only to have them interrogated and exposed on the program. Primetime struggles to really evoke much from showing the program’s success affecting those involved, particularly Hansen and the baffling psychological state it brings him into.
It’s quite the uncanny impersonation by Pattinson, particularly in the voice. But it’s a great performance filling out a weak character. The film fails to really get to the core of such a person, maybe because their motivations seem so simple. There is a pretty haunting scene explaining how Hansen met a demon behind this “ancient evil” whilst visiting India, but it doesn’t delve on much other than supporting the fact that Chris Hansen has a dislike of paedophiles, trying to embellish this simple character through an overdramatised performance and spooky lighting.
If you happen to know the real-life story of how this TV show initially concluded, then that’s going to completely extinguish a lot of tension this film is building towards as it chugs to its climax (at least it does so with visual style). And the final note that this film ends on is a really insubstantial conclusion, making some crude point about the lethal consequences of trying to achieve notoriety through television superstardom. This is a point that’s been made plenty of times before and in much more fascinating, intensely told, and less muddled ways.
Maybe the film should’ve substituted the names of the Chris Hansen character and the To Catch a Predator show, as it comes across as so confounding to go for such a heightened and dramatic rendition of reality. And perhaps it could’ve chosen a more suitable reality show to highlight the frenzy and hysteria and warped sense of morality in the burgeoning age when such shows were making a splash, rather than the fairly straightforward, stylistically un-flashy, and less morally problematic program Hansen presented.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN