The real-life To Catch a Predator host tore into A24's unauthorized dramatization on his own podcast, calling the film a fever dream detached from anything he actually lived through.
Chris Hansen finally saw the movie about himself, and he wants everyone to know exactly what he thinks.
The former NBC News journalist behind To Catch a Predator caught a Thursday night screening of Primetime, A24's unauthorized dramatization of his 2006-era Dateline segment, and used Friday's episode of his podcast Have a Seat with Chris Hansen to deliver his verdict. It wasn't kind. He called the Lance Oppenheim-directed film overly dramatic, detached from reality, and, in his words, a "fever dream." Robert Pattinson, who plays the fictionalized Hansen, got a flat D grade.
"I think because the character is so detached from reality, from anything I've ever experienced then or now doing the investigations, I'm not sure what the point of it was," Hansen said, filmed leaving a Times Square AMC right after the screening, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Primetime, out now in US theatres, follows Hansen's TV persona as the sting operation that trapped adult men attempting to meet minors grows from a Dateline segment into its own primetime slot. The show was always controversial, drawing criticism over its cooperation with the group Perverted Justice and questions about entrapment. That's the backdrop A24 chose to dramatize, and reportedly turned considerably darker in tone.
Hansen's biggest issue isn't just Pattinson's take. It's that nobody from the production ever called him.
He told THR days before the screening that A24 hadn't reached out to him or anyone involved in the original operation for input. Oppenheim, per Hansen, has said the project began after he received a personalized Cameo video from him, and a mutual friend later relayed Oppenheim's own description of the film as something like a love letter that "gets a little weird in the storytelling." Hansen isn't buying the love-letter part.
"They didn't want to hear that Chris Hansen is a good guy. They didn't want to hear that this work is important," he said on the podcast, speaking with Fox News' Jesse Watters. "This director had a dark image of what he wanted to do. He wanted to create a horror-like film with interesting photography, and didn't want to hear anything else."
He also flagged specific inaccuracies, including invented scenes involving Jeff Zucker and Stone Phillips that he says never happened, and pushed back hardest on the film painting him as a distant father, which he insists doesn't match how he is with his own kids.
As for Pattinson specifically, Hansen wasn't handing out sympathy points for effort.
"He's got work to do. I'm kind of the only guy that counts for this, right?" he said.
Hansen isn't stepping away from the format that made him famous, either. He still hosts Takedown with Chris Hansen, and his TruBlu network dropped the trailer for a competing documentary, I'm Chris Hansen, the same Friday Primetime opened. Whether that documentary becomes his real rebuttal to A24's version remains to be seen.
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