Predators exposed, but at what cost?

 

   Robert Pattinson plays TV personality Chris Hansen in Primetime, a movie built around Hansen's To Catch a Predator, an NBC Dateline segment that ran through 2007. Dedicated to exposing and shaming pedophiles, Predator piled up huge ratings, even as some critics found it sleazy and exploitative. 

   The always adventurous Pattinson becomes the wobbly centerpiece of a story that portrays Hansen as an ambitious, sometimes tormented careerist. Eager to attract viewers, Hansen pushed the taste envelope with face-to-face encounters that used decoys to attract predators and raised ethical questions about an approach some regarded as entrapment.

   I’m not sure the film or Pattinson gets a handle on Hansen or on a major helping of "trash" TV that patted itself on the back for exposing pedophiles, not a group that garners much, if any, public sympathy.

  Although underused, singer Phoebe Bridgers appears as Del, a decoy who sometimes poses as a boy to lure targets. An excellent Skyler Gisondo plays innocent-looking Decoy Dan, an aspiring actor who believes his work on Predator will showcase his acting talents. 

    Matthew Maher portrays Xavier Von Erck, the show's online investigator; Erck enters chat rooms to identify possible targets for exposure. They're led to believe they're about to have a sexual encounter. Before anything tawdry can happen, Hansen enters the room, ordering the unnerved subject to "take a seat." He then berates them before they're arrested.

    Hansen’s personal ethics are called into question. He tries to break off an affair with a young woman (Caroline Hebert) in hopes of salvaging an already shaky marriage to his wife, Mary (Anna Francis).

     Merritt Wever lands the biggest supporting role as Andie Bender, Hansen’s equally ambitious producer. A no-nonsense operator, the highly focused Andie understands the show's needs.

      Faced with a ratings dip, Hansen tries to land a big fish, a Texas prosecutor Hansen considers his "whale." The incident goes wrong. The prosecutor commits suicide during a police raid that Hansen and his crew are filming, a dramatic incident that hardly needed the overstatement director Lance Oppenheim gives it.

       Overall, Oppenheim’s direction tends toward self-conscious visual expression that's not to my taste. To create the movie's pressured atmosphere, he employs squared aspect ratios sleaze-soaked desaturated colors, blurred images, and color bleeds. 

      For the most part, Primetime can't find convincing ways to connect Hansen’s story to larger themes. Is the show’s popularity an indictment of its sensation-hungry viewers? Is the movie about the hypocrisy of hiding sensational stories behind ginned-up moral outrage? Is there something larger to be concluded about the ratings-crazed appetites of broadcast television? What makes the movie's predators tick?

      I wouldn’t call Primetime a failed movie, but to be a better one, it would have had to push beyond its obviously presented issues or become a deeper character study about a narcissist who at one point wakes his young sons to show them an inappropriate episode of Predator, perhaps because he thinks they’ll be impressed by seeing Dad on TV. 

       The movie treats TV as a breeding ground for overinflated egos. Hansen is clearly envious of Stone Phillips (Bill Heck), a former anchor of Dateline NBC, whose reporting was considered more issue-oriented than Hansen's.

      Hansen, by the way, currently has a show that operates in Predator mode and can be seen on various streaming outlets. The movie doesn't tell us that, but it's a bit of post-movie reality that contradicts the shopworn bromide about the lack of second acts in American TV.