Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly how I feel about Primetime, which feels intentional. I went in expecting to feel pretty icky about it, from virtually every angle—and that’s nearly where I landed. What I didn’t quite expect was not being able to tell what this movie has to say about its subject, if anything. If it’s intended as a showcase for Robert Pattinson’s talents, it certainly succeeded there—but I left wishing I’d gotten a bit more.

Shouldn’t a movie about a show as exploitative as To Catch a Predator have something clear to say about it? There is so much to say about the actual television series, which aired twenty episodes between November 2004 and December 2007 (most of them just between February 2006 and July 2007), that it feels odd that Primetime has so much less to say. If nothing else, it reflects the moral bankruptcy of the entertainment industry as it blurred the line between “news” and entertainment—after all, To Catch a Predator was part of Dateline NBC, but was transparently more concerned with ratings than with actually catching child predators. When the most elaborate sting the show staged inevitably ends in a kind of tragedy no one can particularly feel good about, we see the show’s producer (a wonderful Merritt Wever) say to show presenter Chris Hansen (Pattinson), “I can make this work.”

What does something like this do to the “performers” who play the decoys, anyway? Skyler Gisondo plays “Decoy Dan,” the 23-year-old actor cast to impersonate boys as young as 13. Gisondo does a great job of conveying the wild emotions that must go through someone who sees a guy whip out his dick and spray whipped cream all over it. (This never actually happened on the show, by the way, although some did get caught completely naked.) This is indeed a wild situation to be in, being a young man impersonating a teenager, who then becomes subject to a genuinely pedophilic act—all of which is caught on camera. One wonders whether “Decoy Dan” needed therapy after this.

Director Lance Oppenheim’s film is thus ripe for examination of the psychological effects of all this, but what we get instead is something presented as a media satire. Is it really satire, though, if it’s inspired by things that actually happened? Just because Oppenheim is taking artistic license doesn’t mean he’s not reflecting real life here. Hollywood has a long history of films depicting a dystopian media future, and here we have something that winds up being pretty disgusting from all angles, and it happened two decades ago.

I haven’t even gotten to how many of these sting operations, which were done with the cooperation of local law enforcement, stink of entrapment. No one wants to be defending pedophiles, but there are proper ways to catch criminals, and this isn’t quite it. Among the many ways To Catch a Predator was criticized, Charlie Brooker wrote at the time, “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it's doing something wrong.” This is worth noting because in many cases, Primetime does exactly the same thing, and it does not seem to be commenting on the fact that To Catch a Predator was itself doing it. We see actors portraying the entrapped predators, and we feel conflicted because of how close we get to sympathizing with them.

And, to be clear, I do hold the controversial stance that even pedophiles should be treated humanely. There have been a couple of films in the past, most notably the 2004 Kevin Bacon film The Woodsman, that dared to challenge their audiences with this notion. It’s a provocative idea worthy of debate, and an idea not particularly explored in Primetime, which is far more concerned with Chris Hansen, his (fictional) producer Andie Bender, and their insatiable quest for ratings. These people don’t really care about the supposed righteousness of catching these predators, except that it is this idea of righteousness that brings in audience numbers. There are multiple scenes of fans talking to Hansen and saying things to him like, “You’re doing the Lord’s work.” Of course no one is considering the damage being done to the people actually doing this “work.”

There is a subplot involving The National Inquirer hounding Chris Hansen for comment on photos taken of him with a woman he had an affair with, a clearly juicy angle given his purported moral crusade—as if a simple affair is in any way equivalent to pedophilia. Primetime’s cinematographer, David Bolen, shoots a ton of the action in incredibly dark rooms, almost to the point of distraction. I know the show’s crew did a lot of its work in hiding, but if they are all in separate rooms, am I to believe they still kept the lights off? This combines with a heightened style of shooting to really drive home of the darkness at play. And yet, everything onscreen is designed to entertain us more than to elucidate us, which kind of makes Primetime guilty of the same thing To Catch a Predator was guilty of.

And I won’t deny it—I was very engaged by this movie, maybe even entertained, albeit at someone of a loss when it ended. The acting is excellent, especially on the part of Robert Pattinson but also Skyler Gisondo as “Decoy Dan,” as well as Merritt Wever. I just can’t come up with a purpose to this film that sits well—the same as any sane person would feel about To Catch a Predator. I’d have loved to be enlightened by this film in some way, and instead I was entertained. There are certainly some who feel that the publicly humiliating punishment of pedophiles is just and right as well as entertaining, but I’d rather we just find an efficient way to protect our children from them. Using them for entertainment is not it.

*A media satire about a sickening subject, what fun!*

Overall: B