I’m not all that familiar with Chris Hansen from To Catch a Predator; I mean, I know of him, but that’s about. In Primetime, Robert Pattinson plays him in this new thriller, based on his life.
Primetime stars Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Matthew Maher, Phoebe Bridgers, Victor Brunette, Ana Faris, Alex Winter, and Jonathan Lipnicki. Yes, the littel kid from Jerry Maguire.
Lance Oppenheim directs, who’s having a bit of a run this year; I hear that his You Can See Everything is doing well.
The Story
Primetime is a dramatisation of real-life events, so it’s been Hollywoodised.
We open with MarriedAndLookForFun31313, who’s meeting up with what he thinks is a 13-year-old boy. The house is empty, cookies are made, and it’s about to get dark. That is until Chris Hansen (Pattinson) shows himself and asks the guy what he’s doing there.
Chris has a team, with a guy online who pretends to be a kid, a 23-year-old lady who can pass as a teenage boy or girl, plus his production crew. They lure predators online to end up with a meeting in person. There, they can expose them.
They hire a new guy, Dan (Gisondo), who can pass for a teenage boy. At first, he thinks it’s just an acting gig, but has issues dealing with what is going on.
The TV show is moved to primetime, so they need to keep up the pace and try to catch a ‘whale’ of a predator: someone in the government or a CEO.
The story breaks down what they go through, all while Chris is facing a smear campaign against him. Overall, the story is very good and gets very intense.
The Cast
Isn’t it funny how some movie careers pan out? If we look back to Twilight, there were three main stars: Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, and Pattinson.
Stewart has got nuts and blames men for all of her issues and generally hates everything and everything. Lautner has fallen off the radar like a Porkin’s X-Wing.
However, Pattinson has been doing well, very well. In fact, he’s been doing everything he can to make sure people forget he was ever in Twilight.
I wouldn’t say Primetime is a ‘career-defining performance’, but he is excellent in this. I felt sorry for Hansen, I felt where he was coming from, and I felt like I was with him every step of the way.
As I said, I don’t know much about Hansen, but I feel like I do now.
The other standout cast was Gisondo, who plays ‘Decoy Dan’. He thinks the entire thing is an actor job, and happy to take it. However, he soon learns that it’s more serious than he thought. They are exposing men who are planning on doing terrible things. There’s more weight to it than just doing an advert for a company.
I understood what he was going through, although I was glad it was him and not me. I wouldn’t want to be in his place.
Overall
I don’t need to break down the story; Primetime does that perfectly itself, and this movie is worth a watch.
The style of direction is very intense, with lots of close-ups so you feel the pressure everyone is under. There is a ‘style’ to the whole thing, as it’s added a grain to most of it, so it looks like film.
Although it’s also filmed in 4:3, which is becoming a bit of a trope at the moment. I’m guessing the original series, To Catch a Predator, was in 4:3, but the rest of Primetime didn’t need the same ratio. I think they do it to be ‘cool’.
That’s not taking anything away from what Oppenheim has done here; technically, the movie is excellent. I liked the style; the acting is outstanding, and it’s a very good story. Primetime is worth your time.
Rating
It was so refreshing to see an originally made movie, without all the CG camera flying around people on a greenscreen. This movie is film.
I can’t say it’s a ‘fun’ watch, but it’s definitely worth seeing.
