I expected to walk out of Primetime feeling uneasy. The subject matter alone — child predators, undercover stings and the darkest corners of the internet — practically guarantees it.

Instead, the thing that left me cringing was Hollywood's decision to turn Chris Hansen, the man who spent years exposing predators, into something resembling the villain.

That takes a special kind of creative detour.

Hansen himself has now pushed back against the film, saying the A24 production takes his real-life work and twists it into something almost unrecognizable.

“I think it shows people what Hollywood is really about,” Hansen said on his podcast, Have a Seat With Chris Hansen.

He went further, accusing the production company of exploiting his story for dramatic effect.

“You hope people realize that there’s no way it can be true,” Hansen said.

And that may be the strangest part of the entire exercise. The real story was already disturbing enough.

Hansen's To Catch a Predator investigations became a cultural phenomenon after the series debuted in 2004, arriving at precisely the moment Americans were beginning to understand how easily predators could use the internet to target children.

The formula was simple because it didn't need much embellishment: undercover decoys, online conversations, a house filled with cameras and a predator who believed he was meeting a child.

Then Hansen would walk in.

“Have a seat right over there.”

That line became television history.

But Primetime apparently decided that wasn't enough.

Robert Pattinson captures Hansen's distinctive voice, and the movie recreates recognizable pieces of the investigations, including the famous “take a seat right over there” line and the plate of cookies used during the stings.

The problem is that recognizing the pieces doesn't necessarily mean recognizing the man.

At times, the film feels less like a serious examination of Hansen's work and more like someone reconstructed his entire career from a collection of YouTube clips.

There is the decoy greeting a potential predator with an innocent “Hey! Come on in!” There are the snacks. There is the awkward small talk. There is the bizarre spectacle of grown men entering a house expecting one thing and discovering something entirely different.

One exchange captures just how surreal those encounters could become.

“Chocolate chip’s my favorite.”

“Mine too,” the high-pitched decoy “teen” voice responds from off camera.

Even after Hansen enters, some suspects remain so committed to the fantasy that reality apparently needs to hit them over the head.

“Wow, these are home-baked?” one man asked Hansen.

That moment doesn't need Hollywood to make it darker. Reality already did the work.

Hansen says the movie nevertheless goes in another direction, transforming the investigations and their central figure into something detached from the reality he remembers.

“It was so detached from reality or anything that I’ve ever experienced then or now, doing the investigations, I’m not sure what the point of it was,” Hansen said.

“In a way, it’s a hit piece on me and the series. Which is weird because all we do is expose bad human beings who try to hurt children.”

And there it is.

There is certainly room to debate reality television, the ethics of sting operations and the complicated line between entertainment and law enforcement. Those are legitimate subjects. But there is something deeply backwards about taking a man whose public identity was built around confronting adults who pursued children and then making him look more sinister than the people he confronted.

Hollywood has spent years turning cultural heroes into cautionary tales and turning cautionary tales into entertainment. Sometimes the target deserves scrutiny. Sometimes the story is complicated.

But sometimes the supposed villain is simply the guy who showed up and asked the predator to take a seat.

Hansen's complaint is therefore about more than one movie. It raises a broader question about what happens when Hollywood gets hold of a real story — especially one involving morality, children and people who make their living exposing evil.

The temptation is always to complicate the hero until there isn't much of a hero left.

But some things really aren't that complicated.

A predator targeting children is the problem.

The person exposing him is not suddenly the problem because Hollywood decides the story would be more interesting that way.

And if Primetime wanted to make audiences uncomfortable, it succeeded. Just perhaps not in the way it intended.