Review: PRIMETIME Is an Over-the-Top Ride Fueled by Robert Pattinson’s Bizarre Chris Hansen

I really didn't know what kind of movie I was walking into with Primetime. I knew it was inspired by Chris Hansen and the whole To Catch a Predator phenomenon, and I knew Robert Pattinson was playing a fictionalized version of Hansen, which was already enough to make me curious.

I don't know much about the real Hansen outside of what I remember from To Catch a Predator, so I wasn't bringing some deeply researched opinion of the guy into the movie. I also wasn't expecting this to be a glowing celebration of him. What I didn't expect was just how freaking weird, funny, awkward, and mean Primetime would get.

Director Lance Oppenheim has made a fascinating movie here, and despite some issues I had with the way he tells the story, I enjoyed it. The story kept me engaged, the cast is amazing across the board, and Pattinson gives one of those wonderfully bizarre performances that captured my attention.

At the same time, the movie is so aggressively stylized that it occasionally feels like it's fighting against its own story. Pattinson is easily the most interesting part of the movie.

His version of Chris Hansen is creepy, but not necessarily in the way you might expect considering the subject matter. He's creepy in this wonderfully specific, socially uncomfortable way where everything about him feels slightly off.

It's in the voice, the posture, the facial expressions, the pauses, the way he carries himself and the way he interacts with everyone around him. He doesn't always seem like a regular human being moving naturally through the world. He feels like someone constantly performing the version of himself that he thinks everyone else wants to see.

It's incredibly strange, and Pattinson completely commits to it. Pattinson isn't really doing an impersonation of Chris Hansen. He's playing an exaggerated interpretation of this television personality, and the performance occasionally gets so big that it borders on cartoonish. Somehow, he makes it work, though.

It's one of those performances that's difficult to properly explain because you really need to see the physicality of it. Hansen can be uncomfortable, self-important, pathetic, ambitious, funny and creepy all within the same scene.

Pattinson plays him like a guy who has gradually become consumed by his own television persona, and that becomes increasingly fascinating as the movie goes on. Sometimes it's completely ridiculous and over-the-top, but it works.

He's also surrounded by a terrific cast, including Merritt Wever, who plays Hansen's producer and gives the movie an important counterweight to Pattinson's increasingly bizarre energy. The performances are a huge reason the movie worked for me as well as it did.

One of the things that surprised me most about Primetime is just how hard the movie goes after Hansen. Again, I wasn't expecting a heroic Chris Hansen biopic. The entire concept of To Catch a Predator has always existed in a morally complicated space.

On one hand, the show exposed adults who were allegedly attempting to meet minors for sex. On the other hand, all of this was being packaged as television entertainment with ratings and an audience tuning in every week to watch these confrontations unfold. That gives Primetime plenty of interesting material to play with.

But the movie doesn't simply question Hansen's methods or his relationship with fame. It absolutely unloads on the guy. This version of Hansen is portrayed as a lousy husband, a questionable father, a difficult coworker, an opportunist and someone who becomes increasingly addicted to his own celebrity.

We see him waking his kids up in the middle of the night so he can show them footage of himself on television, and because it’s To Catch a Predator, it’s completely innapropriate for these kids.

We watch painful interactions with his wife where he's apologizing while she looks completely exhausted by him. We see his ambition and his desire to succeed collide with the supposed morality behind what he's doing. Again and again, Primetime finds another way to expose something ugly, pathetic or uncomfortable about him.

That's where things get interesting because the director isn't really trying to make a regular Chris Hansen biopic. The movie is much more interested in the cultural version of Hansen, the guy who became a television personality and eventually an internet character whose mannerisms, voice and confrontations became memes.

When viewed in that wasy, Pattinson's exaggerated performance starts making a lot more sense. He's not necessarily playing Chris Hansen the person as much as he's playing this warped pop-culture mutation of Chris Hansen. It gave Pattinson permission to get completely weird with the role, and believe me, he takes advantage of that permission.

At the same time, it creates one of my bigger problems with the movie. If you're going to explore the mythology surrounding Hansen, I wanted to see a little more of why that mythology became so powerful in the first place.

We occasionally see him operating effectively on camera, and there are some fun nods to his recognizable voice, mannerisms and television persona, but those moments are heavily outweighed by scenes emphasizing his failures and selfish behavior. The movie keeps hammering away at the negative side of him until the portrayal starts feeling surprisingly vicious.

By the end, Primetime comes dangerously close to feeling like a hit piece whether that was the intention or not. The movie doesn't owe Hansen a flattering portrayal, and I'm certainly not arguing that it should turn him into some heroic figure.

I just found myself surprised by how relentlessly savage the characterization becomes. It's almost impressive how committed the movie is to making this guy uncomfortable to be around.

As for the visual style of the movie, Primetime is insanely stylized and I time could be distracting. I get that this movie isn't supposed to feel like an ordinary biographical drama. I just didn't always enjoy the way it was presented. There comes a point where visual style stops supporting a story and starts competing with it.

That's kinda frustrating because this story really doesn't need that much decoration. The story is already compelling, the characters are interesting, and the performances are fantastic. We don't also need every other frame trying to climb through the screen and smack us in the face.

One of the more interesting ideas Primetime plays with involves the concept of monsters. Who exactly is the monster in this story? Is it the predators being caught? Is it the guy building a television career around catching them? Is it the network packaging these confrontations as entertainment? Is it the audience watching all of this from home? Is everybody involved getting pulled into something ugly?

The movie repeatedly circles that idea, and subtlety definitely isn't what it's going for. Hansen himself is sometimes presented almost like a creature wearing the skin of a television personality. Things even get downright animalistic at one point.

That's the material in Primetime that I found the most fascinating. It's much more interesting to me than simply asking whether Chris Hansen was a good guy or a bad guy. Unfortunately, I think the movie sometimes gets so caught up in making Hansen look grotesque that it doesn't dig as deeply into those larger ideas as it could have.

The movie is clearly taking creative liberties. Primetime has personality. Maybe multiple personalities. Possibly all screaming at the same time. But there's definitely something alive and interesting happening here.

In the end, I liked Primetime. If you remember the To Catch a Predator phenomenon or you're simply curious to see Robert Pattinson transform Chris Hansen into one of the more interesting characters he's played, it's worth checking out.