A morbidly fascinating inquiry into performative justice, moral superiority and public shaming as crude fuel for reality television, Primetime is a superficially fictionalized account of Dateline NBC’s controversial To Catch a Predator, or as Jimmy Kimmel once called it, “Punk’d for pedophiles.” Robert Pattinson is equal parts cracked and chilling as host Chris Hansen, portraying him as a ruthless ratings hunter with a grandiosity complex and a chip on his shoulder because he’s not Stone Phillips.

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The targets Hansen went after were legitmate sex offenders, soliciting what they believed were children in online chatrooms. And while many have protested that every human being deserves empathy, no one’s going to feel sorry for a bunch of creeps preying on girls and boys as young as 13 for sex. But the methods used in the show’s sting operations, as depicted here, uncomfortably skirt the dubious boundaries of entrapment. 

To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004-2007 — a version still plays on Hansen’s TruBlue streaming service dedicated to true crime — and spawned numerous copycat shows, may have positioned itself as a vigilante takedown, getting deviant monsters off the streets and keeping more children safe. But this was sordid spectacle, trash TV dressed up as an Important Public Service, which almost 20 years later leaves an even more acrid taste in the mouth than it did back then with its most damning critics — and there were plenty.

If all this sounds familiar, that’s because last year’s doc by David Osit, Predators, covered much of the same ground very effectively. Does this first narrative feature from accomplished documentarian Lance Oppenheim draw new conclusions? Not really, unless you count on-the-nose takeaway questions like: “Who in this scenario is not a predator?” “And who isn’t to some degree grooming someone more gullible here?” 

The choice to make a film about a program built on exploitative virtue signaling as if it’s an exploitation movie itself — complete with a grubby, grainy vintage video look and lurid saturated colors — certainly has the potential to be provocative. But Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh, who based his take on Luke Dittrich’s Esquire article, Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, are a tad heavy-handed in making Hansen a borderline-unhinged egomaniac from the start. Not that Pattinson, who just keeps getting better, isn’t riveting to watch.

Hansen is introduced running lines from disturbing chatroom transcripts (“I will undress you and you will undress me”) as if they are Eugene O’Neill dialogue, rolling the word “lubricant” around on his tongue for maximum ick factor. 

We see a sting unfold as a nervous ex-Marine (Tony Revolori) turns up at a house where one of the show’s regular decoys, Del (singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, in a remarkably assured acting debut), is waiting. A twentysometthing woman convincingly passing for 13, Del makes an excuse to grab something from another room just as Hansen makes his dramatic gotcha entrance, quoting the whimpering Marine’s chat lines back at him.

This is a carefully coordinated operation, with To Catch a Predator producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) following the multi-cam coverage on monitors in a van parked nearby. When Hansen wraps up with his usual “You are free to leave,” cops are waiting outside to arrest the sex offender. The other key cog in the machine is Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), another self-inflated vigilante running a website called “Perverted Justice.” He plants the bait by posing online as underage prey, then reels in what he breathlessly hopes will be a “big fish.”

Early on, while manipulating freaked-out fresh decoy recruit Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) into coming back for more by convincing the aspiring young actor he’s a superhero savior of children, Hansen says: “Nothing I do is acting, Dan.” 

That might be the funniest line in the movie, given that everything he does is acting, whether assuming the grave tones of a newscaster on a noble mission, reassuring his wife Mary (Anna Faris, in what’s virtually a cameo) that he can be the husband she needs, or placating Krysten (Caroline Hebert), the woman with whom he has been having an affair, when he attempts to end it and she threatens to talk to Mary.

Around the same time, Hansen gets a call from National Enquirer informing him that they have photo evidence of his extramarital excursion and intend to run a story on America’s No. 1 arbiter of TV justice being a hypocritical cheater. The slimy lowlifes just keep on coming!

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The turning point for Chris and Andie comes when they are summoned to the office of Jeff Zucker (amusingly playing himself), at that time CEO of NBC Universal Television Group. Zucker expresses his distaste for their show but concedes that the American public can’t get enough of it, so he’s moving To Catch a Predator to primetime. The network honcho criticizes the small-potato offenders featured up to now, telling Chris and Andie they need to upgrade to “high-impact” targets, putting on the pressure.

While Osit’s doc contemplated what the collective thirst for justice and appetite for televised humiliation might say about the American public, Primetime never digs that deep, which made me question what this flashy but shallow movie hopes to achieve. It’s exposing precisely nothing, merely raising the same questions, such as: If sex offenders are so easily lured, why aren’t cops doing a better job of rounding them up?

It works best as a character study, with Hansen becoming progressively more obsessive in his quest to topple ABC’s Lost from its ratings perch. But for anyone disturbed by the way To Catch a Predator executes its faux-law enforcement busts, the movie risks becoming viscerally unpleasant. Putting every squalid detail up there on screen neither explicitly condemns nor condones the crimes it depicts, but the experience of absorbing this kind of bottom-feeding populist TV can get nauseating.

The more interesting dynamics among the main characters are played with plenty of bite, notably the growing friction between Chris and Andie as he begins going over her head, unilaterally deciding to relocate shoots and causing budget overages to soar. There’s tension in the hostility between Andie and Xavier when the latter starts getting in Hansen’s ear about going after “a whale.” And an overture from an ABC exec (Jessica Hecht) to Andie to jump ship represents another kind of unsettling grooming.

Everyone is on some kind of power trip here, including freckle-faced, completely fictionalized “Decoy Dan,” played with a sharp mix of ambition and pathetic naïveté by Gisondo, who hasn’t been used to such advantage since Booksmart and Licorice Pizza. His scenes with Bridgers, whose Del gives him quick pointers by demonstrating her ease at switching between boy and girl roles, are a real insight into the function of “performers” on reality TV.

The filmmakers don’t shy away from the shocking incident that many attribute as the cause of the NBC show’s cancelation (Hansen maintained it had simply run its course) — when Rockwall County, Texas, assistant district attorney Bill Conradt (Alex Winter) fatally shot himself on-camera just as a SWAT team was closing in after he was caught talking and exchanging pictures with a Perverted Justice volunteer posing as a 13-year-old boy.

In a key moment, Andie speaks up at Hansen’s urging to nudge the hesitant Texas cops into “now or never” action, pointing to the murky dividing line between television news journalism and law enforcement. After Conradt blows his brains out, Andie says with eerie calm, “I think I can use this.” The reaction of gung-ho county police chief Cortland Gunn (a gleefully over-the-top Bokeem Woodbine), on an excitable crusade to keep Texas pedo-free, strikes a more comedic note: “That boy-fuckin’ Democrat piece of shit!”

It’s in these climactic scenes, too, that Pattinson really sinks his teeth into the questionable ethics of Hansen. He tells a panicky Dan: “You’re gonna be a part of television history. You’re either with me or you’re with him,” meaning Conradt. Hansen follows with a theatrical “Showtime!” whisper, as if he’s Roy Scheider in All That Jazz.

Oppenheim manages the actors with finesse, getting strong work especially from Pattinson, Gisondo, New York stage regular Maher and the always brilliant Wever. But although Primetime is entertaining in a sicko, silly sort of a way, it shows too little intellectual or psychological curiosity to displace Predators as the more serious study and might leave you wondering who and what this anti-date movie is for.

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