A primal scream set to queasy colors and power chords, “Primetime” will no doubt prove divisive. Railing and wailing against Bush-era hypocrisies with a virtuosic, operatic aggression, it’s the kind of film that either gets you on your feet, howling along, or leaves you flattened and faintly aloof. I’m in that second camp, though I won’t pretend this riff on “To Catch a Predator” and Chris Hansen lacks craft or conviction.
Much of that craft involves amplifying and distorting a recognizable feeling into hyperreal extremes. Like the radiation that turned some cute little critter into Godzilla, “Primetime” inflates the residual ickiness of “To Catch a Predator” into a Wagnerian assault that makes you want to crawl right out of your skin. It paints a mural of American grotesquery from the trail one particularly slimy journalist left behind.
That journalist — well, infotainer, anyway — is Hansen (Robert Pattinson, but you knew that). On the page, Hansen reads as your garden-variety media monster, the kind of familiar philanderer who bonds with his boys by keeping them up to watch his latest segment (that the very subject of the show is inherently designed to prevent parents from sleeping is immaterial here, since father and sons are mostly just checking out his hair).
But in the hands of one of the greatest actors working today, this self-obsessed flake becomes a certified freak — a mutant of envy and ambition masked as a righteous crusader. The facade barely holds from the start; well before we want to crawl out of our skin, Chris is already beelining out of his. Any challenger coming for the Weirdo crown would best lay down their arms by the time Pattinson responds to a more respected journalist’s passive-aggressive slight by somehow making 17 unique faces in the span of about 2.5 seconds. The man is the GOAT, long live the king.
Only “Primetime” pretty much defangs any satirical bite by adopting and spreading Pattinson’s gonzo performance style across all formal choices (producing credits for both the star and Ari Aster seem particularly notable here). The colors pop with incandescent shades, the image warps with a pre-flatscreen aspect ratio, and the characters all move through the world as if lit by the glow of an old set. The whole thing plays like a nightmare of early-2000s broadcast — an Adult Swim one-off half-remembered from a night fully stoned. It certainly builds to a feverish pitch.
Hansen concludes each broadcast with the same question that Oppenheim uses to bookend the film: “What would happen if I weren’t here?” Of course, doing so lays out the whole moral and thematic blueprint, making explicit right from the jump that in these games of entrapment we all already know who the real predators are (hint to all Nielsen families: it’s you), leaving the film’s one main idea fixed in stone, and that pitch nowhere to go but up. Higher, louder, nastier, stranger, more febrile, more ratings — the show is now competing with “Lost,” for God’s sake, and that show had a freakin’ polar bear.
Because Hansen himself is also pretty much fixed – that is, until the character recedes from the film’s wicked machinations once he’s gripped with anxiety about an upcoming tabloid exposé – producer Andie (Merritt Wever) and sting decoy Dan (Skyler Gisondo) step in to give the narrative some shape. Each wrestles with the same ethical questions mediated by, well, the thrill of dominating the media. Why entertain good taste when you can have a hell of a lot more fun putting cameras on guns? Why be good when you can be on TV?
As the ultimate purveyors of infotainment, the “Predator” crew is pitched somewhere between spectacles like “Desperate Housewives” on one network and debacles like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on another — further cementing the film as a kind of Bush-era howl.
Hansen casts himself as a moral avenger, claiming the same unshakable rectitude as TV strongmen like Jack Bauer and Donald Rumsfeld. “You’re either with me or you’re with him,” he says at one point, echoing a certain doctrine. The filmmakers take the analogy further, giving Hansen an origin story that links the rhetoric of the global war on terror to the mythology of 1930s serials like “The Shadow”: He discovered an unspeakable evil in the mythic Near East, only to find that it had followed him back. The war has hit home.
All the same, “Primetime” finds more interesting ground in the contrast between then and now. As the film builds toward an apocalyptic confrontation involving a heavily militarized Texas police department and a local D.A., Hansen retreats into near-catatonic anxiety when the tabloids begin circling. Here, too, is a vestige of the Bush years — one forever neutered once Cousin Billy handed over his “Access Hollywood” tapes. But in 2006, public shame could still kill, even when the offense paled beside the prurience Hansen himself peddled. “How old was she?” his producer asks. “Thirty!” he snaps.
The barb might land harder if “Primetime” didn’t assault us from every angle — but that’s exactly what the 30-year-old filmmaker intended. You don’t land the Wednesday, 9 p.m. slot by pulling your punches, and you don’t spend a lifetime weaned on such media without eventually wanting to hit back.
A24 will release “Primetime” in theaters everywhere on Sept. 25.
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