What’s It About

In 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Picture a country built on genocide, rape, and children in chains. Now fast-forward 250 years. That same country has a president who was found liable for sexual abuse, paid $5 million for it, and whose name pops up all over millions of pages of Epstein files packed with ugly claims about girls. Picture that we never even needed those files, because he bragged to Howard Stern about strolling into pageant dressing rooms while women stood there half-dressed, and Miss Teen USA contestants, some as young as 15, later said he did the same to them. Now picture him launching a war on Iran while plenty of folks, Republicans included, called it a smoke screen for those same files. Right in the middle of all that, Lance Oppenheim drops a movie about To Catch a Predator. Not about the predators. About how host Chris Hansen was a ratings-hungry egomaniac. What the F***? Let me get my rant out the way first. The review is coming, because the movie is good even when the timing is wild. Was TCAP propaganda that made cops look like superheroes? Yes. Did a Texas prosecutor shoot himself instead of facing what police came to pull off his computer? He sure did. Is reality TV a swamp full of producers with no souls? Obviously. Was Hansen a cheating husband and, if this movie is right, a bad dad and a worse boss while he chased creeps? Probably. But Lance, I’m gonna hold your hand gently when I say this: none of that is worse than being a child predator. In the last scene, Pattinson’s Hansen asks his signature question, “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Only this time, he’s crying. Let me answer for him. That prosecutor keeps the files on his computer. He keeps logging into chatrooms. He keeps going after kids. And if he grinds long enough, maybe one day he ends up running the whole country. If I were supposed to cry along with Chris Hansen, then it was not meant for my audience. But who is the actual audience? We can say that none of the people involved in the Epstein case have really suffered any consequences. Title IX rules have just been repealed, which will make universities safer for predators and not survivors. The president of the U.S. lost a case for sexual violence, and nobody even noticed. So why is Chris Hansen’s ethics the one you want to criticize so much? Hansen has admitted that people can argue he wasn’t doing traditional journalism, or that he worked too close with police. He says the show still kept the cases strong in court and pushed the work forward. Cops don’t hand victims justice, and most predators never see a single consequence. So while powerful abusers stroll around free, I’m not losing sleep over whether the man whose stings led to more than 350 arrests played dirty. Take down the Epstein network first. Then we can circle back to whether Chris Hansen was a jerk. Okay. Rant over. Here’s the review. Don’t mix this up with David Osit’s 2025 documentary Predators, which walked through the show’s rise and fall. Primetime is Oppenheim’s first narrative feature, written by first-timer Ajon Singh for A24, and it plays loose with the truth to keep you locked in. It blends horror and comedy into something slippery and dreamlike. Tilt it a few degrees, and it’s a Boots Riley joint. Was this movie always coming? Have a seat right over there. Oppenheim’s wife once bought him a Cameo from Hansen congratulating him on his doc Spermworld, and watching Hansen slide straight into selling himself stuck with him. The story itself grew out of Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire piece, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” about Bill Conradt, a former Kaufman County district attorney working as a Rockwall County prosecutor. In November 2006, he chatted with a decoy posing as a 13-year-old boy for a sting in Murphy, Texas. When he never showed up, police and the Dateline crew went to his home in Terrell instead, and he shot himself. That episode basically killed the show. Alex Winter plays Conradt, one of several comedy names going serious here. Anna Faris plays Hansen’s wife, Mary Joan, mostly staring at a husband who’s vanishing into the ratings. In one scene, he wakes his sons in the middle of the night just to make them watch the show, and the blue glow off that boxy old TV becomes the whole movie’s color scheme. Matthew Maher plays Xavier Von Erck, leader of Perverted-Justice, the vigilante group that posed as kids in chatrooms. Skyler Gisondo gives one of the best performances in the film as “Decoy Dan” Plum, a struggling actor who takes the gig to chase a SAG card and ends up being the one who reels Conradt in. Dan is loosely based on real decoy Dan Schrack, stretched into a blend of many decoys. Merritt Wever’s producer, Andie Bender, is made up, and so is Bokeem Woodbine’s trigger-happy police chief. Phoebe Bridgers, in her acting debut, plays real decoy Del Harvey and sings “On Video” over the end credits. Tony Revolori, Bob Ari, and Jonathan Lipnicki pop up as predators, Lipnicki with a can of whipped cream. Lord. This ain’t the beginning. Primetime starts in 2006 with the show already huge, and NBC boss Jeff Zucker, playing himself, bumps it into primetime against ABC’s Lost. “We’re going to be bigger than Lost!” Hansen cheers. That rivalry is invented, but it hands Pattinson a reason to come unglued, and that’s exactly why you’re buying a ticket. The opening shot soaks Pattinson in devilish red light as he rehearses his lines like an actor about to step onstage. The grainy, home-video look and the way the color rots right along with him? That’s real filmmaking. He’s sharpest when the cameras are off, and he’s falling apart: the affair, the tabloid story about to drop, begging Dan not to quit, chasing his “whale” all the way to Texas. Still, Wever is the true MVP, quietly holding the suits, the crew, and Hansen’s ego together with both hands. It’s a heck of a movie. I just wish somebody would point that camera at the right people.

OUR RATING:  A PEDO ARRESTING 7