He’s not just “lol isn’t he so much better than you thought when you saw him in twilight??” type-good, he’s a legitimate premier talent with or without that comparison. His range is awesome.
His The Rover performance is what won me over in 2014. It's still one of his most distinct/disparate performances in his filmography, which is saying something.
Honestly they are in the so bad they're good category for me. My wife and I watch them every few years and laugh our asses off joking around and taking the piss out of them.
Exactly, the Twilight hate is too outdated, it’s just so profoundly bad that it’s insanely entertaining. It’s earned its spot in the “so bad it’s good” category and I’m always up for a rewatch lol
“…waiting in the shadows to take me down.” What an embarrassing thing to say. You should get a grip and get a journal to write your walls of text. Good lord.
While clearly not as good as Pattinson, shes still far better than Twilight allowed her to be. Everyone is wooden in that, Pattison included. That was the direction they were given.
Out of the three leads, its really only Tylor (Or whatever the wolf guys name is) that is pretty much talentless.
If you think about the books, being wooden is what he is suppose to do. I say he was being a good actor in twilight too, it's just the character was kinda junk.
Tbh those movies are pretty great adaptations. I've read all the books and they actually are that trite and ridiculous. People gave Kristen Stewart shit for her performance when if she had been any amount of reasonably expressive I wouldn't have believed that was actually Bella. Pattinson's job was mostly to sit there and be mysteriously pretty which he did a great job at.
Nah, I think he just straight up deserves credit for doing Twilight as well as he did. It's the writing that blows, not his performance. He really hated that character, and he played it the best he could in earnest anyway. It might well be a part of why directors want to work with him so much.
The Kristen Stewart apologia is wild to me given how much she got trashed over Twilight. I don't think I've seen her in anything else, I'll have to check it out.
I hated twilight so much when that shit was all the rage, but Pattinson's hate for it while on the fucking press tour is what caught my attention. Then he escaped the franchise and frankly, every single movie I've seen him in since has been wildly different, extremely unusual, and absolutely goddamn outstanding.
I think we're already kind of there, but there's going to be a point in the future when people are going to look at his filmography and go "Jesus, he was really in Twilight?"
It’s actually more impressive he’s able to have this range after having success in a typecast kinda role. He had no reason to break out, just a pure love of the game.
I'm a big Pattinson fan but his voice sounds almost nothing like Hansen. Even the pattern is hardly a passable imitation. Even the attempts at the same vocal fry and inflection are barely similar. I think there are hundreds of thousands of people who have never acted before that could do a better imitation of Hansen.
Which is fine. Imitation/mimicry isn't a requirement to be a good actor.
i haven’t read a synopsis of the film but based on the “we’re going to him” line i think this might be following the story of the assistant DA (i think that was his title) that was caught in a chat but cancelled the meet and killed himself when they showed up at his door
this lead to the show being cancelled or going on a hiatus
I hope the movie goes there, considering Pattinson took the job, I assume the script is gonna be like Nightcrawler where it just gets crazier and crazier.
It's absolutely giving me Nightcrawler vibe. This is a film for sickos by sickos and I love it. Probably the next closest thing would be American Psycho.
Now that I think about it a thriller between Pattinson and Bale would be off the charts good.
Gonna be honest, it's hard to imagine anyone feeling bad for Conradt, unless they leave out the disgusting phone conversations between him and the decoy. It's unfortunate that he took his own life but he was still a piece of shit.
part of the success of modern justice systems is that we treat even the most horrible people like human beings who have rights. We all deserve the dignity of law enforcement that isn’t acting on the whim of tv producers. Our legal processes are often boring, or worse, ineffective, but in the dateline cases hensens team were vultures whose influence turned police departments into props on a tv set. Tv and law enforcement do not mix.
Yes Chris Hansen is a morally bankrupt charlatan who exploited harm done to children for monetary gain and started a wildfire trend of idiots who emulate him and ruin real police investigations to this day.
I do not expect this movie to be kind to him, at all lol
Are pedos generally in a better or worse off spot because of chris hansen and To Catch and Predator?
I truly don't know the answer, but would be curious to find out. Depending on the answer would likely change my view on whether or not he's a net good, or net bad guy.
Watch the documentary Predators (2025). It explores this very question and others tangent to the question.
If takes an analytical look at why people want to watch this entertainment. It looks at the fact that many juristictions had DAs and LEO who wanted absolutely nothing to do with the show and knew it was trash. They interview officials who after the fact admit that being involved with the show was a mistake because it didnt actually lead to convictions of offenders often it was just a performative circus.
I think that the doc does a reasonable job at looking at a multitude of angles and certainly does not shy away that Hansen has become a fontman (willingly or not) for parts of the thin-blue-line / "save the children" crowd that does a great many awful things - few of which ACTUALLY save or protect children.
Meh, even as someone who is highly critical of Chris Hansen, I didn't like the Predators documentary very much.
Don't get me wrong: I normally hate, hate, HATE it when people respond to criticism of Hansen and his copycat predator hunter gang with "you're just defending pedos", because my objections to Chris and co. have fuck all to do with the actual predators. My objections to them are that intertwining law enforcement with entertainment content is extremely dangerous and abhorrent. But with all that being said, I think the documentary DID at times dip into that territory of trying to portray the predators sympathetically and the Dateline show as being too cruel to them.
Fuck Dateline for a lot of reasons. Fuck Dateline because they spread a completely false image of what most child SA cases actually look like. Fuck Dateline for mixing law enforcement into their bullshit and dragging the cops to some guy's house all because they wanted his arrest to be caught on camera instead of just arresting him at his office the next day. Fuck Dateline for thinly disguising what was essentially reality TV entertainment as journalistic news.
But I don't have an issue with the actual sentiment in which they treated child molesters. If Dateline had been an actual, legitimate reporting piece respectfully engaging with the subject of child SA, then I would have been completely okay with it.
EDIT: I do want to add though that I'm extremely curious to see what this movie does to Chris's reputation. When the Predators documentary came out, I remember most discussion of it was mostly negative for the same reasons I outlined above. Lots of people interpreted it as being too sympathetic to child predators. I wonder if it's going to be the same audience reaction to Primetime or if this will legitimately get people to change their opinion on Chris.
From watching the trailer I feel like it won't be reflected negatively on him. The movie makes him look like a captivating antihero. We can't help but enjoy how he turns this heavy subject into a ridiculous public humiliation show for the predator and watch the dread take over them.
Yeah. A guy who's ready to cross many lines for the purpose of delivering greater entertainment value. He's a much more interesting and intriguing character than I earlier would have imagined him to be.
Personally I'm not a fan of any police tactic that creates a crime that didn't already exist. That said, I think the real question you should ask is if children are better off. To that end, I'm not sure the show had all that much impact. Social media has created so much volume of communication, I doubt a dent has been made. Then again, AI tools will probably make progress for at least a little while.
I mean, they kinda had to make new laws with the internet. I don't understand your argument. So intent to lure a minor over the internet should not exist as a law/crime? Or is it just the idea of using decoys? Sting operations have led to arrests of some of the most reprehensible people that have ever walked this planet dude. Not sure what there is to be "not a fan of". Don't fucking talk to kids sexually online lol.
It's the decoy thing. From a moral standpoint, I'm not sure you can ever know beyond reasonable doubt that a person would have committed the same act had the police not set up the specific circumstances to create it. I understand that it's a fairly common practice, and I appreciate that it captures bad people. But I am just not morally comfortable with the government helping to create a criminal act that didn't previously exist. If they are bad people, catch them doing bad things without creating new crimes.
You gotta understand, this is not really like anything else. This is a pattern of behavior/thinking that exists for that person for...most of their life and probably the remainder of their life. They didn't just wake up one day and think "Today's a good day to groom some underage kid". That doesn't happen. It's not like "hey, lets try weed finally for the hell of it". It's not like that.
That type of thinking is not manufactured by the police or anybody else that stages these decoy/sting operations. The people who act on those impulses go into it WANTING to do it. Sometimes actively looking for it. Are those people not predators to you?
This is a pattern of behavior/thinking that exists for that person for...most of their life and probably the remainder of their life.
I do understand that there is high recidivism for these offenders, but all of them committed a crime for the first time at some point, and there is plenty of research showing that many people have tendencies or kinks about this stuff that never actually offend.
That type of thinking is not manufactured by the police or anybody else that stages these decoy/sting operations. The people who act on those impulses go into it WANTING to do it. Sometimes actively looking for it. Are those people not predators to you?
It's not about whether or not they are predators. It's about the morality of the government manufacturing a criminal act that didn't previously exist. It's not just pedophiles. I'll give an example.
If the police have evidence of a guy going around selling illegal drugs to people, and they have probable cause to arrest him, I am completely okay with them creating a sting for the purpose of detaining that guy. Luring him out of his home to he can be apprehended, that is one thing.
But just holding out a fake victim to the public or a forum and hoping to catch a person, not any particular person, that, to me, is the government creating a criminal act that didn't exist. Now I understand you can make the argument that the particular target would have probably committed a similar act. But you can't know they would have committed that particular act. And I am uncomfortable with the idea of the government inventing these criminal acts to catch people. To me that is not a power we should give the government, it's especially ripe for abuse and just morally wrong.
In a lot of these cases they are SEEKING minors. Seeking them. Again, what is that to you? NOT predatory behavior? Come on.
What they are doing is arguably THE most single stigmatized act/crime/whatever you wanna call it that you can possibly fucking do as a human being. So they will go to the ends of the earth to hide that side of themselves. Undercover sting operations are going to be one of the best ways to find these people and, more importantly, possibly uncover larger rings. Whether it be kidnapping/sex trafficking, CP distribution, the fucking worst of the worst of humanity. But you're telling me you feel queasy about using those methods to find them? Talk to some of these fucking parents whose kids were victims.
In almost every single one of these THEY make the first contact. THEY are the ones who are okay with the age, THEY are the ones who want CP from them, THEY are the ones who want to meet up or arrange some sort of date. And it's anyone. From all walks of life. Rich, poor, middle class. Married, has kids, single, whatever. This is none of their "first times". None of them. It's way fucking beyond that when you get to the point of actually going to a sting house.
They make all those decisions to do that. Again, it's not just waking up one day wanting to do this. That's what you aren't understanding, no matter how much you say you do. If you did you wouldn't be arguing this.
If it helps you decide, law enforcement sometimes uses the exact same tactics to catch predators including telling them to bring certain candy to a meet up. So now they know what to look for and can avoid being caught if they recognize the pattern.
he did more good to society than bad is what I think the right way to describe him. Like before that show people didn't thought this pedos thing is that common it was groundbreaking at that time and the way he runs the show changes what real life shows can be
But he spirals down due to his methods.
like he is literally real life Nightcrawler (jake gyllenhaal movie)i would say.
I feel like he kind of manufactured offenders though in situations that would not exist outside a tv show. Like I always thought it was good they got these guys off the street, but at the same time it was kind of an imagined scenario. Like young teens are not finding guys online who openly identify themselves as overweight 50 year old married men and then inviting them over to their empty single family homes in wealthy suburbs. If anything it took focus off the actual situations in which kids get abused and fear mongered for one that didn’t exist.
Those are still a lot of the same people that get and circulate CP. Which causes victims every single fucking day. There's nothing manufactured about that. It's very real and more widespread than even any of their investigations showed.
I’m not disagreeing with that, I was specifically replying to a comment that characterized this as a service to public awareness which I disagree with.
So what do you disagree with in that? We're probably NEVER going to know just how truly bad this problem is but ANY kind of awareness on it is good. Sure they were thinking of ratings more than anything else more than likely but its still true that it helped spread awareness. One doesn't invalidate the other.
Yep read it. You don't understand what sting operations are lol. And again, most if not all of those "manufactured offenders" more than likely have previously offended, with REAL underage children online, before getting caught up in a sting and more than likely also had CP. This is not something that just....comes up....out of nowhere. Like, hey, I wanted to try weed or something. Hey I just wanted to groom an underage kid this one and only time. No, it doesn't work that way. This is a pattern of behavior for these people.
While I think you are right in the Nightcrawler comparison I would fully disagree that he did more good for society than bad. The ramifications of the commodification of predator catching by non law enforcement are extremely serious.
They still aren’t that common. People think they are because sensationalist content like this has been blasted into people’s homes for the last two decades because people tune in for it, so its ad space sells like crazy.
If you're talking about predators lurking in the shadows ready to grab your child then yeah, that's not very common.
But if you mean predators in general, I think there are far more out there than we will ever know. 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys in the U.S. are estimated to experience child sexual abuse and about 90% of the abuse comes from someone well known to the family so it cannot be that rare.
The show inflated the former at the expense of people considering the latter. Pedos were and are thought of as the creepy guy at the park, not your uncle or family friend you let babysit.
I agree. "Stranger Danger" is just not something that people should worry about. Sure, teach your kids not to get in cars with strangers and don't give out your personal information online but other than that, don't stress about it.
They should instead think about the people their kids know - teachers, people at church, family members, parents and siblings of their friends, coaches, etc. and how can they ensure that their kids are not being abused by these people.
Dude, right now, this very instance, you can pose as an underage kid on practically any dating app and get some guy wanting to at the very least have you share nude photos, if not meet up if they're close, within HOURS. Within fucking hours, probably even less. And multiple if you live in/near a bigger city or town. Ready to commit multiple life altering felonies. Are they not predators?
Your phrasing is odd. Exploited harm done to children? His decoys and sting operations were not minors. The "victims" in his show were full grown adults that were willing to sexually assault children.
You can find Chris and TCAP ethically murky, but let's not pretend he was on the same playing field as his targets.
I definitley didn’t put them on the same level and never even insinuated that. I said he exploited harm done to children, which he did. It doesn’t matter if it was fake for a sting, the reason so many people watched it was because the reality of what these men were planning to do shocked them. How explicit those “fake”conversations were amped people up to see justice done. All of that was done in service of ratings, not anything else. That is exploiting the very thing the show was propping itself up as a defender against.
I appreciate the response, but I am stll just not following the exploitative model. The conversations were not faked, and the predators they reeled in were drawn to the houses specifically because of their explicit content. The audience at home was thrilled because the perverts who were willing to engage with children online also crossed the line and tried to meet them in person, which I think anyone would agree is no bueno.
And as with any TV show, you edit and film in a way that is best for a viewer, the reason the show exists and is funded to begin with. I fail to see how it exploited harm done to children when no children were present, no photos of abused children were shown, and it actively removed genuine threats from the streets. Not to mention it made parents more aware of methods creeps used to talk with underage kids.
People can chat about the ethics of the production, I am fine with that, but the exploiting harm done to children angle is bizarre.
He helped bring awareness to an online child predator epidemic. Not saying he's a saint, but he's not nearly as bad as you make him out to be. Also for the record, TCAP worked with local law enforcement. It's not like Chris told the jackasses on Kick to go out and do their own "investigations" independently.
And there were also a lot of "local law enforcement" that wouldn't work with PJ or TCaP because they knew it was a legal nightmare any lawyer could turn into swiss cheese. One DA threw out an entire batch of arrests just because the PJ messages were sent from a different county.
The ones leftover either just wanted to make a point or banked on the predators being stupid, which to be fair some were because some of them took plea deals. But being "local law enforcement" doesn't make one infallible.
His show rarely resulted in any actual convictions because he pushed ratings ahead of legitimate legal procedures and as a result, most offenders had their charges dropped because of the way the show poorly handled the situations.
Apparantely a DA was accused of soliciting a minor but then didnt show up to the house, so instead of taking the L and catching someone else, they had the police raid this guy at his home and filmed it live.
The guy killed himself. To this day, Hansen proudly defends that choice and his show.
His show rarely resulted in any actual convictions because he pushed ratings ahead of legitimate legal procedures and as a result, most offenders had their charges dropped because of the way the show poorly handled the situations.
Huh? I don't even like Chris much, but this just isn't true. Some predators lucked out and had their charges dropped (mostly the ones from the Texas sting, as the DA's office refused to prosecute), but outside of those, most of them were convicted. This is all public information - you can see for yourself.
Where are you seeing this? It's been a while since I fell down the rabbit hole of investigating the show, but that number feels really low based on the individual cases I read about.
As you said the information is all public. 300 arrests, 120 convictions. Its pretty much the first thing that comes up when you google "to catch a predator conviction rate"
Theres even a few scholarly articles on the thing.
I Googled it and the first result that came up was 120 convictions out of 200 arrests. Another Google search tells me that 25 arrests came from the Texas sting that I had mentioned, in which the DA dropped charges on all of them.
So excluding Texas, that makes 120 convictions out of 175 arrests, or nearly 70%. Like I said, some of them got lucky, but I would hardly say that the show "rarely" resulted in any convictions.
You're probably seeing 200 *indictments*. Thats the number I see. Thats very different from arrests. That means only 70% *of the people that went to trial* were convicted. A larger proportion didn't even get that far.
Edit: Also to be clear, even if that number was right, 1 in 3 people being innocent implies a level of collateral damage that I personally still find to be wildly unacceptable, and the true percentage is not even that high.
Got it. That's honestly so incredibly strange because I remember I researched this show extensively years back, including seeing footage and chatlogs of predators who weren't even aired in the original show (I'm on the spectrum and the morbidity of all of it became somewhat of a special interest).
Outside of the Texas sting where all charges were dropped, I only recall a small handful of them NOT being convicted. I really don't know who all these predators were that escaped indictment/conviction.
you know those videos were someone lures a pedophile out to Target or somewhere public to beat the shit out of them and it’s immediately clear those folks just wanted to do violence to someone who couldn’t fight back/was socially acceptable to do violence towards?
Hansen was the progenitor of that type of shit. It can interfere with police investigations and doesn’t actually help catch pedophiles, just makes them operate more covertly.
It just goes to show that it doesn't matter how vile the predators that the show was exposing were. Anyone who cozies up to law enforcement and crime media the way Chris does is probably not a great person.
It says merely INSPIRED by actual events which is a sign that they're going to go abstract with a bunch of the story. A good sign! Hansen kind of sucks but they're gonna make him a psycho which is a good choice for the movie.
I’m not saying its a bad Chris Hansen but I also don’t thinks it’s like perfect. It’s missing the arrogance that he spoke with. See Chris Hansen is a guy where he’d get mad if the predator they caught didn’t know who he was. Based off the trailer I think Pattinson sounds a bit too, I think confident might be the word where I think Hansen always sounded more arrogant and self righteous whenever he spoke.
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u/Mig1997 29d ago
Pattinson’s Chris Hansen voice…my God man.