I’ll be honest, the most i know about To Catch A Predator is just having heard about the program and its controversy back then, and having seen it parodied many times (even on Robot Chicken and fuckin Squidbillies) while never watching the actual show.
Keep this in mind.
Then again, this is sold as more or less fictionalized retelling of how in 2006 journalist Chris Hansen devised a new format, To Catch A Predator, where he both fed into the newfound hunger for “reality tv” by the population, and mounted essentially a sting operation, as he and his team (via hidden cameras, actors and computer experts) lure out sexual predators into a trap scenario, with Chris onfronting the “predator” inside while the police is on the ready outside.
The hypersensationalistic format proves popular enough that NBC moves the program to the “primetime” slot, making it compete in popularity with frigging ABC’s Lost, and so Hansen gets more and more incensed to keep the ball rolling, to try and keep interest in the format and rating alive and well, to continue his moral crusade and escalate it further and further…
Pattinson is playing a hyper narcistic sleazy human monster, in a way not too different from Jake Gyllenhall’s reporter character in Nightcrawler, and the movie focuses also heavily on a young actor that gets hired to play one of the “bait teens”, confronting the many, MANY questionable aspects of the format, etc.
It’s not too original, it’s another tale of how power corrupts, how the media machine feed into the voyeurism of “reality tv”, exploititing sensitive issues for the sake of summary mob justice, though it doesn’t hit too hard in the days of the Epstein list (plus the ending could have been better), but its still good, pretty solid stuff.
