No wonder Chris Hansen is furious

Should Chris Hansen ever watch the trippy movie “Primetime,” about the rise and fall of his “Dateline NBC” series “To Catch a Predator” during the mid-aughts, I doubt he’ll be any less miffed by the end than he reportedly has been in the weeks since the trailer dropped.

Master of disguise Robert Pattinson plays the host, who turned confronting and locking up pervs into TV popcorn entertainment, as ruthlessly ambitious and freakishly intense. A snarling creature more so than a human, here he’s envisioned as the Gollum of network news. “To Catch a Predator,” his “precious.”

This highly fictionalized, borderline disturbed version of Hansen is a crusader on two fronts.

On one side benevolent, he fully believes that trapping and publicly shaming pedophiles is his sacred duty.

“We’re cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” the character says with the quiet ferocity of a tiger.

Many people will strongly agree with that point of view, albeit in less grandiose terms.
Selfishly, he is also fighting for fame. 

Hansen’s internal battle echoes the chief contradiction of “To Catch a Predator” that has generated debate for 20 years — that it’s both good and bad.

Yes its methods were ethically fraught (a newsman with ratings on the brain taking an overactive role in police work, producers strapping cameras to cops for action-packed shots, etc.), traumatic for its young actor “decoys” and occasionally dangerous to all. But, hey, it brought pedos to justice, didn’t it?

Beyond the core mission, Pattinson’s extremely unlikable Chris is a narcissist with a chip on his shoulder who envies the perch and popularity of his patronizing “Dateline” colleague Stone Phillips. Stone gets to report from Iraq and Afghanistan — not Fort Myers cul-de-sacs. Hansen desires that level of power as well, and it’s finally starting to come to him.

In an early scene, NBC CEO Jeff Zucker (who, in a bizarre move, plays himself) gives the show a coveted 9 p.m. Wednesday time slot.

“I don’t really understand your show. I don’t like it. I don’t believe in it. But America loves it,” the real Zucker, clearly longing for the spotlight as much as the main character does, says.  

Hansen runs home and wakes up his young kids in the middle of the night to tell them, “They’re gonna put me on primetime!”. They don’t seem to care. Even his children underestimate him.

So he will go to risky extremes to maintain and grow the unexpected ratings boom of “To Catch a Predator” at any cost.

Hansen tells his producer Andie (Merritt Wever): “I need to do something big — bigger than ‘Lost’.”

What he does ends in a death — the suicide of one of the sickos, which was reprehensibly turned into an episode — and the resulting cancellation of the program.  

Directed by Lance Oppenheim, “Primetime” is not a routine biopic that gives a literal rundown of events, but rather a moody funhouse nightmare for its two main subjects: Hansen and Dan (Skyler Gisondo) the “decoy,” a budding musical-theater actor who takes the “Predator” job to get his SAG card.

Dan Plum, a gifted improviser who can convincingly play a boy, becomes the MVP of “Predator,” and Gisondo, who’s most famous for the “Spider-Man” movies, is the MVP of “Primetime.” He softly captures Dan’s suburban naivete and good intentions while never losing sight of his big-city dream of being a real working actor.

Andie, with the manipulative tactics of a reality TV producer, feeds Dan’s fragile ego by telling him how great he is. Having never heard that before, he’s intoxicated by the praise and commits fully to the cause. Until a life-changing event when he can’t anymore.

The real decoy I assume Dan is based on, Dan Schrack, has spoken about his regrets in recent years.

“You could offer me $10 million to film that episode in Texas again, and I wouldn’t take it,” Schrack said in the 2025 documentary “Predators.”

That painful conflict is always present in Gisondo’s sad eyes.

Wever’s facilitator is not so sympathetic. She is masterfully spiderlike as Andie, who sees her sole job as running the most successful business possible. She’s a Lady Macbeth, coaxing, conniving and competing to get exactly what she wants. That the episode works is more important to her than a criminal being put away.

That consequences-be-damned determination leads to the heartpounding climactic scene, which Oppenheim has staged as a front-lawn war zone.

A note on nightmares: Within minutes of waking up in a cold sweat, you usually forget you ever had one. Similarly, Oppenheim’s movie is haunting, riveting, funny in spots and visually arresting. But it doesn’t stick with you quite as forcefully as the doc “Predators” does. The movie is a focused character study rather than a resonant expression of an idea.

“Primetime” comes down hard on Hansen, no doubt about it. Gung-ho Pattinson explodes as the host’s life falls apart and he descends into madness. However, it’s more of a good time than a profound one.

I wondered if that was Oppenheim’s aim all along: If “To Catch a Predator” could turn criminal justice into sensationalized entertainment for the masses, then why can’t I do the same thing with Hansen?