Predator, Catch Thyself: "Primetime," reviewed.

The lurid, unsettling film Oppenheim has made dramatizing all of this isn’t a biopic, though Robert Pattinson’s flashy performance as Hansen is the basis of its promotional campaign. As demonstrated by the clipped, nasal line readings he gives of the catch phrases Hansen drops on his prey—“You see how this looks, right?” “Why don’t you have a seat right there?”—Pattinson is not attempting naturalistic mimicry of Hansen (who has condemned the movie, unsurprisingly), or of any human creature. The English star is giving us an Oily American even more obviously craven than the one he played in The Odyssey, wherein he and Tom Holland both affected American accents to play Bronze Age Greeks because that’s the mode of the film.

My Washington City Paper review of documentarian Lance Oppenheim’s feature debut Primetime is here.