Robert Pattinson delivers an unnerving performance as Chris Hansen, the host of the reality television series "To Catch a Predator," in the new film "Primetime." The verdict from critics: the performance unsettles, the movie around it does not.

Pattinson, long known for transforming himself into off-kilter characters, plays Hansen at his most unglued. The review describes the actor's turn as "unhinged" — a portrayal that pushes the television host figure into genuinely disturbing territory. It is the film's strongest asset, according to the critic's assessment.

The movie itself, however, pulls its punches. The review states plainly that the film "doesn't bother to delve too deep." Where Pattinson commits fully to the strangeness of his character, the surrounding picture settles for surface-level treatment of its material.

The choice of subject is loaded. "To Catch a Predator," the NBC hidden-camera sting operation hosted by Hansen, ran from 2004 to 2007 and became a cultural phenomenon — part public service, part spectacle. Its blend of entrapment television and moral theater made it a fixture of mid-2000s American pop culture, and it has since spawned endless memes, rewatch podcasts and a lingering set of questions about exploitation dressed as journalism.

That rich, contradictory material gives Pattinson plenty to work with, and by the critic's account he makes the most of it. The performance lands as the film's center of gravity: unnerving, committed, hard to look away from. What the movie lacks, the review suggests, is the willingness to meet that performance with equal rigor — to ask what the original program actually was, and why audiences could not stop watching.

The result is a familiar shape in Pattinson's recent career: a daring, disorienting central turn embedded in a project content to gesture at its themes rather than excavate them. "Primetime" joins a run of films in which the actor's transformations outpace the vehicles built around them.

For audiences, the calculation is straightforward. Those who follow Pattinson's evolution from "Twilight" leading man to character actor in the vein of his recent auteur collaborations will find the performance worth the price of admission. Viewers expecting a sustained interrogation of the predator-sting genre and its ethical quicksand will leave wanting.

How the film fares with wider audiences and awards-season voters will become clear as it reaches theaters and streaming platforms in the coming months.