PRIMETIME Review: Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen Movie Becomes the Thing It Hates

It was raining, my wife and I had the afternoon together, and a matinee sounded like exactly the kind of responsible adult decision you make when you have successfully escaped the house without a child attached to either leg.

Popcorn. Reclining seats. Two uninterrupted hours in the dark.

Lovely.

Then Robert Pattinson showed up doing what I can only describe as Chris Hansen by way of a haunted Saturday Night Live sketch, and Primetime proceeded to make the entire afternoon feel vaguely contaminated.

You know that feeling when you watch something and afterward you don’t necessarily think it was incompetent, but you would like to wash your hands?

That.

And I really wasn’t prepared for it, because in a world already overflowing with misinformation, sensationalism and people screaming half-truths at each other, you would think a movie built around one of television journalism’s most recognizable figures might be interested in reality.

Instead, Primetime gives us a deliberately distorted Chris Hansen, drops him into a nightmare built from To Catch a Predator, and asks us to wrestle with what happens when journalism, entertainment, ambition and moral outrage start feeding on each other.

That is actually a pretty good idea.

I just don’t think the movie earns it.

APPARENTLY, PATTINSON DID DO HIS HOMEWORK

My first reaction to Pattinson’s performance was that there was absolutely no way this man had spent significant time studying Chris Hansen. It felt like somebody had watched a marathon of To Catch a Predator, found a few Hansen memes online and started doing the voice at a party until everyone begged him to stop.

Turns out I was wrong.

Pattinson has talked about how difficult recreating Hansen’s voice was and how much work he put into it. Director Lance Oppenheim has also explained exactly what he was going for, describing Primetime as neither a traditional biopic nor an attempt at straightforward realism. He calls it a “fever dream” and a “media collage” made from the different versions of Hansen that have accumulated through television, parody and internet culture.

That makes the performance make considerably more sense.

It also makes my problem with it bigger.

Oppenheim has said he originally discovered To Catch a Predator through parodies, including South Park and old internet comedy, before going back and watching the actual show. He remembers Hansen as this almost mythological television figure, less Walter Cronkite than Tony Montana walking into a kitchen with a transcript and asking somebody to have a seat.

So yes, they did the homework.

Then they deliberately turned it in as a horror movie.

Pattinson is talented enough to sell almost anything, and there are moments when this bizarre creation is fascinating to watch. The facial contortions, voice, posture and increasingly manic ambition all fit the movie Oppenheim is making.

I just kept waiting for Chris Hansen to show up.

SO WHAT EXACTLY AM I SUPPOSED TO THINK?

This is where Primetime gets considerably more uncomfortable.

The movie is not particularly interested in giving us monsters who arrive at a house, get caught and disappear into the back of a police car. It keeps insisting that we look at the human beings underneath the label.

That is not inherently a bad thing.

People who do horrible things are still people. Understanding that does not excuse them, and refusing to understand it doesn’t make children safer.

But Primetime pushes so hard against the moral simplicity of To Catch a Predator that at times it begins to feel like it is putting its thumb on the other side of the scale.

In one confrontation, a man physically grabs Hansen and demands, “What gives you the right to do this?”

It is clearly the question the movie wants hanging over everything.

What gives a television journalist the right to lure people into a staged house, interrogate them on camera, transform their alleged crimes into entertainment and broadcast their humiliation to millions of viewers?

That is a legitimate question.

There is a real ethical problem with To Catch a Predator.

There always was.

But there is another fact sitting in the room that Primetime seems increasingly irritated by: these were adults who believed they were arranging sexual encounters with children.

I can question the television show without becoming confused about that.

A MOVIE ABOUT SENSATIONALISM BECOMES SENSATIONALISM

And that is ultimately where Primetime lost me.

The movie wants to critique a television culture that turned human misery into entertainment, exaggerated personalities, blurred journalism with spectacle and discovered that moral outrage was extremely good for ratings.

So it takes a real journalist, exaggerates his personality, blurs journalism with spectacle and turns human misery into entertainment.

Do we see the problem?

The irony would almost be funny if the subject matter weren’t so miserable.

And maybe that contradiction is intentional. Maybe Primetime wants to implicate itself, the audience and the entire entertainment machine. There are certainly smart people who will come out of this movie with that interpretation, and the film is stylish, purposeful and far too carefully made for me to dismiss it as thoughtless.

But intention only gets you so far.

At some point I still have to watch the thing.

And I hated watching this thing.

Not because it offended me.

Not because it challenged me.

Because it felt icky.

It wants to operate like a horror movie without actually frightening me. It wants me to question journalism without giving me enough reality to evaluate the journalism. It wants me to recognize humanity in terrible people, which is fair, while presenting Hansen himself as such an exaggerated creature that he barely gets the same privilege.

That isn’t complexity.

Sometimes it’s just mud.

HOLLYWOOD, I WAS TRYING TO HAVE A NICE AFTERNOON

I started KazooWatch partly because I wanted a corner of my life where I could talk about movies and television without every conversation eventually becoming politics, outrage, predators or whatever fresh catastrophe the internet has prepared for breakfast.

Hollywood has apparently declined my request.

My wife and I went to the movies because it was raining.

We got popcorn.

We sat in the dark.

And for nearly two hours Robert Pattinson stared into my soul wearing Chris Hansen’s face while Alex Winter made me question everything I remembered about Bill & Ted.

That is not what I ordered.

There is a worthwhile movie to be made about To Catch a Predator. There are legitimate questions about journalism, law enforcement, public humiliation, vengeance and the strange appetite audiences have for watching bad people get punished.

Primetime even asks several of them.

But if your argument is that media becomes dangerous when it sacrifices truth for a more compelling story, creating a distorted version of a real person because the distortion makes better art feels like a very strange way to prove your point.

For that, Primetime gets an EH.

The rain was fine.

The movie is what made me want a shower.

Sorry, honey: Next rainy matinee, I’m picking the movie.

I hope it has a dog.

KAZOOWATCH RATING: EH