Primetime: Robert Pattinson in hypnotic, ‘career-best’ performance

“If we learn any lesson from the movies this year, let it be this: Robert Pattinson is an absolutely fantastic villain,” said Hadley Freeman in The Times.

Following hard on the heels of his excellent turn as the dastardly Antinous in “The Odyssey”, he has delivered a “career-best” performance in “Primetime”, Lance Oppenheim’s dramatisation of the story behind the hit Noughties reality TV show “To Catch a Predator”.

The show’s researchers would pose as children in online chatrooms, in an effort to flush out paedophiles whom they would lure to a “sting house”. Chris Hansen, its host, would then emerge, triumphantly, camera crew and cops in tow. Hansen (played here by Pattinson) believed the show was “cleansing the world of an ancient evil”; in reality, it was “straightforward entrapment for ratings”, and it eventually spun out of control.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

Pattinson is terrific, “nailing” the presenter’s mannerisms and “furiously self-righteous vibe” in an “absolutely hypnotic performance that you can’t look away from, even when you desperately wish you could”.

Anyone who watched last year’s “sobering” documentary “Predators”, about the same events, will know how this story ends, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. That rather drains the tale of tension. But every element of the film seems to “cohere absolutely”, from the screenplay’s “tar-black comedy” to its “giddy, immersive soundtrack” and “top-level” supporting cast.

Yet it is never clear what “Primetime” is trying to say, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. It seems to suggest that while sexual predators are “unequivocally bad”, the people who make trash TV – particularly a show as “sordid” and manipulative as this – are also “immoral”. That’s a “shaky equivalence” to draw.