Whatever you think of Robert Pattinson‘s films, you have to admit he’s one of the most interesting actors working today. It’s hard to find a common thread in the parts he’s played since Twilight, except that he keeps choosing roles that challenge him. His latest, Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, is no exception.
Pattinson plays NBC News investigative journalist Chris Hansen. Hansen had spent years as a reporter, but it was his Dateline series To Catch a Predator that made him a household name.
When the film opens, the show is already a hit. Hansen and his team—including producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), tech specialist Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), and decoy Del (Phoebe Bridgers)—travel from city to city, setting up sting houses and confronting men who believe they’re meeting minors. They finish one operation and move on to the next, barely stopping to consider what all of it is doing to the people involved.
That includes Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), a young actor and musical theater fan who joins the team to help lure the men inside. Dan wants to act and earn his SAG card, so the job feels like a huge opportunity. Unfortunately, he’s thrown into the deep end with almost no training and quickly learns that being part of a hit show is different from anything he imagined.
Then NBC executive Jeff Zucker, played by… the actual Jeff Zucker, calls Hansen and Bender into a meeting. He’s moving the show opposite ABC’s massive hit Lost. Hansen sees a chance to prove just how big To Catch a Predator can be, and the pressure to deliver something bigger than their usual sting begins to take over. His answer is to pursue a high-level judge in Texas (Alex Winter) whom Xavier has been tracking.
If you know the story behind that operation, you probably know where it’s headed. I won’t give it away here, except to say that things don’t end well for just about anyone.
The film has its flaws, like an extended sequence in which Hansen puts his investigative skills to work in an overseas war zone, and I didn’t feel it added much that we didn’t already know about him or wouldn’t learn later.
Thankfully, Pattinson, Wever, and Gisondo make the film work even when it stumbles.
Pattinson’s Hansen is smug, pompous, and arrogant. He takes credit when an operation succeeds, but when something goes wrong, you can almost see him looking around for someone else to blame, which is usually Bender. He also makes a few choices that are so strange and unexpected they shouldn’t work but do so brilliantly, like the way he delivers a line or the flamboyant way he spits water into a bathroom sink. Kudos to Oppenheim for keeping those moments in because they make the performance feel even more daring and, somehow, more entertaining.
Wever’s Bender is Hansen’s voice of reason, or as close as he’s going to get to one. She can bring him back down to earth, or perhaps back up to it, depending on how you look at him. She isn’t afraid to lay down the law because she knows how much he needs her. But by the end, the way we see Bender shifts. Wever has been showing us all along that she can be just as ruthless as Hansen; she’s simply quieter about it.
Del is one of the few people who recognizes what the job is doing to her and gets out. Dan takes longer to find his footing. He gets caught up in the excitement and the ugliness of it all, thanks in no small part to Hansen and Bender. Gisondo makes you feel how badly Dan wants his big break, even as he begins to understand the cost of getting it this way. Beneath all the ambition, he still has a conscience, and that makes him the closest thing the film has to a heart.
Primetime doesn’t always know when to pull back, but its three central performances kept me hooked. By the end, the most unsettling question isn’t whether Hansen and his team are catching the right people, it was how far they were willing to go.
