Fifty years ago, Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s Network was startling for how prescient it appeared. In the era of Woodward and Bernstein, and Walter Cronkite, here was a film about a blossoming rot undergirding American news media, and a capitalistic profit-motive that threatened to write doom across the future of serious journalism and the public it served.Now, I will be the first to admit that serious journalism is not necessarily a term I associate with Chris Hansen, the once ubiquitous face of To Catch a Predator, Dateline NBC’s voyeuristic pedophile profiler. But there is an unexpected symmetry in his role in television news history and how he’s depicted in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime , which arrives 20 years after Hansen’s heyday and half a century after Network.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});What seemed like prophecy 50 years ago is now literally a period piece; a retro reverie of one of the many inflection points at the turn of the 21st century when news programs and networks that postured to be the gatekeepers of public discourse increasingly veered toward the salacious and bawdy, the lurid and lascivious. Even in this context, Hansen is an oddity, a self-aggrandizing rising star at NBC whose milieu doesn’t seem so far removed from the National Inquirer tabloid muckrakers he claims to detest in the film. Yet even the NBC News heavyweights Hansen envies in this same movie are depicted as salivating at the ratings that come with covering the trial and sure-to-be imminent execution of Saddam Hussein during the film’s 2006 setting.Still, what once was a chilling warning about the hollowness of ratings-fixated news programs now plays like a quaint, even cozy relic; a throwback to when exploitative sleaze was at least contained to, ahem, primetime television instead of around the clock Facebook or Twitter algorithm feeds. Robert Pattinson’s Hansen isn’t the idol of his age, but our glorious paterfamilias—an ancestral benefactor who passed down a world of infotainment that ostensibly is doing a public service. He is, after all, unmasking likely (and in many instances later convicted) child predators. Yet the cloudiness of the motivations that drive him to make To Catch a Predator a hit on TV, or simply his drive to have a hit on TV, poisons his crusade into something obscene. Even so, it’s never not watchable, which indeed appears to be the point.One might be forgiven, then, for wondering if on some level the real Hansen is delighted to have an honest-to-Gotham Batman play him in a film. The Batman in question is certainly having a ball, with Pattinson getting the big heroic camera dolly closeups that mid-2000s candid camera rigs could never provide. The movie’s To Catch a Predator host practically purrs, “I’m Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC” when he confronts the first predator of the film, with the camera pushing into his face like he just ordered a shaken, and not stirred, martini. This Hansen knows, like the audience 20 years ago did, that we’re not here to watch a predator be apprehended, but a monster be humiliated, groveling to keep this interview from running on national television. Hansen nor the weight of his righteous pose can be bargained with, however, and Pattinson plays him as a guy convinced he is delivering a big goddamn Hollywood movie quote that will one day be cut into a trailer. (If true, mission finally accomplished, Chris.)But the brilliance of Pattinson’s performance is how otherwise vacant and devoid of humanity it is. At one point in the picture, the character boasts he is not an actor; he’s a journalist. And yet, never once does this man seem genuine or capable of stopping what is obviously performative play-pretend. When left alone in his hotel room, Pattinson’s Hansen still puts on a hell of a show for his mirror, spitting out his mouthwash with the vigor and indignation of Atticus Finch.In a year full of weirdo, oddball performances by Pattinson, this Hansen might be the oddest and weirdest. He is a guy who is by every definition doing a good deed—getting probable pedophiles off the streets, or at least on law enforcement’s radar—but the eerie uncanny valley he lives in, out of reach of man or beast, not to mention his estranged wife (a cameoing Anna Faris), makes him an enigma. Despite traditional matinee good looks, Pattinson seems to be on a Nicolas Cage-like trajectory of making big, idiosyncratic choices in terms of both roles and the counterintuitive ways he inhabits them. In the case of Hansen, the characterization is akin to a reptile or pod person doing an approximation of what he read heroic humans behave like in a book. It’s all an abstraction.This is both Primetime’s greatest strength, as well as a kind of ceiling that caps how far the film can really go with its nihilism. When your central character is ultimately an empty vessel of self-aggrandizement, any insights into his inevitable fall will also be somewhat hollow. Oppenheim, a documentarian by training prior to his first narrative film, attempts to circumvent that limitation by building out supporting characters with some semblance of a character arc or self-realization that is impossible for his Hansen. Thus enters Merritt Wever as Hansen’s long-suffering producer Andie Bender and Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plumb, aka Decoy Dan!Both are well performed, although Gisondo’s young, struggling actor who agrees at the age of 24 to play 13-year-old boys is the only personality in the film offering some counterweight to the hellish darkness. Poor Dan is a musical theater kid who is introduced literally singing “Seasons of Love” from Rent (another ‘90s and early 2000s staple) during his audition. He’s completely unprepared for the “role” he is going up for—and how during his first day on the show’s production, a predator takes off his pants right in front of him with a canister of whipped cream in hand.Gisondo, who plays Jimmy Olsen in the new Superman movies, provides a flicker of innocence, sure, but he is also a barometer that allows any viewer with some kind of conscience to measure the cynicism of everything around poor Dan, including the film. Wever is excellent as a ceaselessly fatigued Andie, but the producer proves only a few clicks less vampiric than Pattinson’s Hansen, and is depicted as literally choosing the poisoned circus of To Catch a Predator’s production at every opportunity. All the other lackies lack any awareness at all as they claim their show to be righteous activism, even as they gleefully chase “whales” and the most sensationalistic of grotesque marks. How else are they going to compete against Lost at 9pm on Wednesdays?!The film is an obvious time capsule of the period where everything was becoming so transactional that journalists and their subjects alike blurred the lines between serious professionals and reality TV carnival barkers. Now the carnival is everywhere, from the social media sphere filled with wannabe Chris Hansens and QAnon conspiracy theorists, to the most obnoxious reality TV star of them all in the White House. None of it is particularly shocking anymore; we’ve been denoting this downward descent for 50 years. But you can’t look away, which as Oppenheim so coolly observes, became the entire metric of success when Chris Hansen went primetime. So… success?Primetime opens in theaters on Sept. 25.The post Primetime Review: You Can’t Look Away from Robert Pattinson’s Weirdest Antihero appeared first on Den of Geek.