I'll fully admit that To Catch a Predator was one of my guilty pleasures back when it was still airing. I remember one weekend some cable channel aired a marathon, and I watched every damn episode in that marathon. And yes, I felt pretty gross about it afterwards.
And to be honest, I felt a bit of the same after watching Primetime.
Primetime is a weird movie, centered on a weird performance by Robert Pattinson as Predator host Chris Hansen. It's less an impersonation than an interpretation, in which Hansen is calm and collected when facing down predators on TV, but a brooding and manic mess in his off-screen life. Pattinson takes some big swings with this performance, and I will not soon forget the way he spits mouthwash into a sink, or uses his finger gun to point at someone's crotch and slowly mouth the word "cock." I'm not sure it entirely works, but it's fascinating to witness.
Set in 2006, the year when Something Bad Happened during the production of the show (a spoiler only to those who have never heard of or watched the show, I imagine), the film is not subtle in its messaging that the pedophiles in the show's cross-hairs weren't the only morally questionable people in that production.
Along with Hansen, there is Merritt Weaver as Hansen's producer, who blanches when offered a job on What Would You Do? the "feel good" version of TCAP, because she doesn't think "feel good" is really her forte. Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC is, wildly, played by Jeff Zucker himself, and his biggest concern is ratings, and finding bigger and badder pedophiles to feature in the show's new time slot against Lost.
The one sympathetic character is Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), an actor hired as one of the show's "decoys," a handful of adult actors that looked and sounded a lot younger than they actually were. He's excited that the role could finally get him his SAG card, but his first day on set goes about as horribly as one would imagine it could when one is forced to essentially perform improv with a pedophile.
Director Lance Oppenheim has only directed documentaries prior to this, and indeed has the very buzzy documentary You Can See Everything, co-directed by Nathan Fielder, coming out next month. And at times Primetime does feel like a documentary, utilizing the multi-camera set-up of the Predator show, and split screens showing multiple angles. But the majority of the picture is filmed in a murky, overly color saturated style that is ugly and off-putting. Perhaps intentionally so.
To Catch a Predator was ostensibly about catching pedophiles before that could harm any children, but the fact is the majority of sex crimes against children are committed by adults the children know, not strangers, and ultimately the show did not have a very high conviction rate. It was always really about entertainment, not justice. I would never go so far as to say I felt sorry for any of the men who were caught by To Catch a Predator's cameras, but I also don't feel comfortable making some kind of moral equivalence between them and the people who created the show, which is the stance Primetime seems to be taking. Yes, perhaps they were all terrible. But please let's not pretend one group wasn't worse than the other.
You're pretty much guaranteed tears when a movie is about a dog, even if the dog survives, which it does in Heart of the Beast. (That's not a spoiler; we learn this at the very beginning of the movie). I was never bored during the film, and much of it is genuinely exciting. But a lot of it is also downright ridiculous, and when I found myself laughing as I was detailing some of the plot later, I realized all you'd really need to do to turn this movie into a comedy is change the soundtrack.
Brad Pitt stars as Special Forces veteran James Belmont. His dog Odin (played by a dog named Uber) is also a veteran, and they both suffer from PTSD. That PTSD results in nightmares that wake them up screaming. Or howling, as the case may be.
When James suffers a heart attack while flying his floatplane through the Alaskan wilderness, Odin is sucked out of the plane as it crashes. Both manage to survive the crash, Odin after taking a long nap, and James after downing some aspirin. The rest of the film finds James and Odin trying to make their way out of the wilderness with only a few tools recovered from the crash.
Things don't go smoothly.
Granted some of what befalls the duo is just bad luck. But an awful lot can be chalked up to bad decision making on the part of so-called Special Forces veteran James Belmont. Such as coming across a ravine and deciding to cross on a fallen tree instead of taking the long way around. Because surely a three-legged dog won't have a problem walking across a slippery tree trunk, right?
Or, upon discovering they are being stalked on all sides by wolves, deciding to continue walking through the woods in the dead of night, but non-nonchalantly; like pretending the wolves aren't there will somehow make them go away. Because I guess wolves are just bullies that get bored if you ignore them.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg of what befalls James and Odin. I'm actually surprised they don't run into trouble with an actual iceberg at some point. I'll freely admit I'm probably an outlier, and most people will find Heart of the Beast to be an exciting and heartwarming adventure story, and not preposterous and unintentionally funny like I did. But I've definitely had more fun laughing about this movie as I described it to friends and family than I had watching it.
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