The real-life Dateline figure calls the Lance Oppenheim drama a hit piece on the show that ran for 22 years exposing predators.
Chris Hansen finally sat through Primetime on opening night, and his verdict on the man playing him is blunt. A D grade, no curve.
The 67-year-old former Dateline NBC host, who spent decades running To Catch a Predator, told Fox News host Jesse Watters that Robert Pattinson's performance left him "so detached, so unhinged, so dark, so unlikable" that it upset "colleagues present and former," Just Jared reported.
Hansen wasn't involved in making the film. He's said before that the studio wanted him to sign a document before an early screening, and he refused. So he waited for release day like everyone else and bought his own ticket.
What he saw, by his account, bore little resemblance to the man he knows. Director Lance Oppenheim has described the film as a "fever dream," and Hansen used that line against him. "Something that was so overly dramatized, so detached from reality... That it wouldn't even bother me," he said, before landing his sharper charge, that it plays "like a hit piece" on him and on the show itself.
That's the real complaint here, not just that the movie is bad. Hansen's argument is that a film built around a journalist who spent 22 years exposing predators has been turned, in his telling, into something closer to horror. "There's all kinds of green hue on his face," he told Watters. "He's obviously having a mental breakdown."
He saved a separate round of criticism for Oppenheim directly, accusing him of chasing style over substance. "He wanted to create a horror-like film with interesting photography and didn't want to hear anything else," Hansen said, adding that the director had no interest in "anything positive" the show achieved over the years.
Whether that's a fair read of Oppenheim's process, nobody outside the production has said on record. But Hansen's wider grievance is about a pattern, not just this one movie. Journalists who built careers going after predators, he suggested, keep getting cast as the villain by an industry that won't sit down with the people it's portraying. "Hollywood wants to demonize the guy doing what I think is very good work," he said.
He's also made clear he considers his own opinion the only one that counts here, literally. "The only guy that counts," is how he described himself while handing out that D.
Pattinson hasn't responded to Hansen's comments. Neither Oppenheim nor the studio has addressed them on record since the interview aired. Given how loudly Hansen wants this fight, his side of it probably isn't done with one Fox News sit-down.
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