L Movie Review 2I never watched To Catch a Predator when it ran on Dateline NBC from 2004 to 2007, being more or less allergic to 21st-century television’s version of “reality” across the board, and after seeing Predators, last year’s documentary about the show and its Faustian host, Chris Hansen, I’m fairly delighted I did not belong to that audience. Just when you thought you were pretty intimate with the demented slop-orgy enthusiastically generated between America and the craven ratings-chasers of network TV, here came a mortification circus that supercharged the worst viewership’s worst instincts in new ways, flouting entrapment laws as it went, in real living rooms. David Osit’s 2025 doc, merely by regurgitating this phenomenon, does a job on you, partly by exploring how subsequent iterations of the lure-and-sting paradigm have been manifested by copycats online; Hansen himself still maintains an influencer presence, talking his sanctimonious shit in podcasts and streaming channels.

The reason the hit show lasted only as long as it did, as both films assert, was the on-camera suicide of Texas DA Bill Conradt, in 2006, after Hansen and his producers couldn’t seduce the man into leaving his house to meet their “decoy” teenager. This then compelled the team and the cops who abetted them to lay siege to the man’s house, with a warrant. Contrary to both the 2025 doc and Lance Oppenheim’s new docudrama version, Primetime, NBC continued to air the show for almost a year after Conradt’s death — his sister’s 2007 lawsuit seems to be the primary factor for the cancellation. This only matters because Oppenheim’s movie twists itself into pretzels trying to make Conradt’s death the climactic trauma to which the whole sick gravy train was hurtling. Osit’s doc makes the new film essentially redundant, particularly since Oppenheim, who’d only made docs himself up till now, decided to give his film the same kind of hysterical-hyperbolic tone that defined Hansen’s rhetorical approach. With this material, you’d imagine an icy, ironic, analytical take (Todd Haynes or Michael Almereyda could’ve cranked on it), but Oppenheim instead builds a tall ham sandwich, forcing his game cast into claustrophobic close-ups and imagining that for Hansen, the show’s entire production, which is further juiced by a looming National Enquirer story telling of his infidelity, is a sweaty, self-fracturing melodramatic meltdown.

We know better, given the history since the show’s demise: Hansen is apparently a much more perniciously pious show-biz monstrosity than the one played by Robert Pattinson, who always seems on the verge of a panic attack. In one midway scene, we come close to a salient concept of Hansen, as Pattinson’s slickster talks down his weeping mistress in a restaurant with the same kind of mannered spiel he uses on TV. But that subtlety is quickly abandoned, as the movie attempts to push an inert story uphill. Oppenheim’s idea was to have this fame-seeker torn apart by stress and ambition and fear, with Pattinson doing a lot of mirror-talking, and it’s an obvious strain, full of all sorts of optical tricks, fake-suspense scenes, and tense relationships (Merritt Wever’s mothery-yet-cold-blooded producer eyeballs another gig because of Hansen’s erratic behavior, but why do we care?).

A good deal of time is spent on Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), the 23-year-old actor playing the 13-year-old “decoy” in Conradt’s case, and how Plumb endured the weird mercilessness of the show and was eventually scarred by his role in Conradt’s death. (He’s in Osit’s documentary, full of remorse.) But even Plumb’s arc in Oppenheim’s stew is hardly an arc at all. The film tries relentlessly to “get inside” these people making this horrible thing, yet in this vexing terrain “inside” is the least interesting place to go. Conversely, as with the original show, the “predators” usually come off as merely pathetic, because we know next to nothing about them.

At the same time, the film is often strangely quiet and inert — such may be the default difference between making a nonfiction film and crafting a dramatic fictionalization. Oppenheim is at least a primo caster; it couldn’t have been easy to snag Pattinson (this is his fifth film in 18 months), and Wever, even in a thin part, is always effortlessly resonant. As another, purposefully androgynous decoy, Phoebe Bridgers is given little to do but bounces off the screen nonetheless, and Alex Winter injects unexpected gravitas in his few scenes as Conradt. Primetime obviously has some sweet bait hooked into it, but there are no takeaways here — except perhaps surprise about how little thinking Oppenheim did about his subject, or about the culture that sucked it up with a crazy straw. Kantian questions remain thick on the ground.