‘Predators’ Review: A Fascinating, Frustrating Doc Examines the Complicated Legacy of ‘To Catch a Predator’
Over its multi-year run as part of NBC’s Dateline franchise, To Catch a Predator wasn’t impervious to criticism or lawsuits, but it was surely insulated.
Sure, you might say, every episode was a carefully orchestrated piece of entrapment in which the relationship between journalists and law enforcement became blurred in a way that the relationship between journalists and law enforcement should never become blurred.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
“What, are you in favor of sexual predators?” fans of the show would then reply
It’s hard to have a nuanced conversation from there.
In his new Sundance-premiering documentary Predators, director David Osit takes advantage of the 17+ years since To Catch a Predator ended to attempt to have those conversations.
The result is a 96-minute film that some people will find disappoining, when what it’s actually about is disappointment, because the temptation when you sit down to watch Predators is to demand a certain kind of resolution or catharsis.
If you’re from the “This show was always icky, the sort of vigilante, ambush television that was in vogue in the early ’00s, before it crept into all of society” camp, you’ll watch hoping for a complete excoriation — of the show’s methodology, its legal efficacy and of lovably smarmy host Chris Hansen.
If you’re from the “There are few moral absolutes in this world, but here’s one of them” camp, you’ll watch hoping for validation, proof that everybody associated with the show went in with pure motives and that the show’s righteous mission can be measured in mathematical terms.
Osit has his agenda, which becomes more and more a part of the documentary’s conversation as it goes along, but his mission is somewhere in the middle. He just wants to understand the phenomenon, a phenomenon that, despite Hansen’s oft-repeated catchphrase, “Let me understand…” was never about understanding.
I found the documentary’s uncertainty to be potent in many of the ways Osit obviously intended, but I didn’t always respond to Osit’s approach.
Like To Catch a Predator itself, Predators stealthily lures viewers in.
The documentary is broken up into three labeled parts, and the first part plays to those with nostalgia for the show, with lots of clips from Hansen-on-predator kitchen confrontations that used to make some audiences cheer. We’re introduced to several of the “decoys” from the series, women and one man who looked and sounded young enough to entice potential predators to houses rigged for filming from multiple angles. That’s where Hansen would make his trademark abrupt appearance and deliver his familiar “You’re obviously free to go,” which would be followed by the perpetrator’s arrest by local law enforcement.
The first decoy we meet seems generally amused by the role she played in the series, so much so that we see her later at a true-crime convention, eagerly greeting Hansen, who is treated as a conquering hero. The second decoy we meet isn’t exactly ashamed of what she did, but she has a hard time watching episodes. Then we meet Dan, who was involved in the notorious Texas episode that culminated in the suicide of a regional district attorney and, directly or indirectly, in the show’s cancelation.
Discomfort sets in, but never takes over, as Osit meets with law enforcement who worked with the show and Texas media who covered the ill-fated episode — and as he unveils unsettling behind-the-scenes footage that came into his possession through unmentioned provenance.
The second segment focuses on imitators, including Skeeter Jean, a YouTube-based ambusher who lacks the real Hansen’s reportorial credentials and general professionalism, but loves ambushing people with the help of a decoy named T-Coy. Skeeter’s doing the show out of enthusiastic fandom — he felt that other ambush hosts didn’t have Chris Hansen’s mixture of wry humor and gravitas, so he decided to try to reproduce it.
T-Coy’s motivations are complicated and align with Osit’s reasons for making the film. The latter does his best work gently pushing people to try to reflect on what To Catch a Predator really did, and whether you can do right things the wrong way or whether an end this primally satisfying always justifies the means.
Osit tries his pushing with Hansen in the documentary’s third segment, and that’s where you can see Osit’s disappointment most vividly and literally. There’s something he wants to get out of this overall filming experience — he has personal reasons for wanting to get it and he knows when he’s coming up short. That’s why Osit goes from a barely heard off-camera presence to a focal point by the end. It’s also when Osit stops relying so heavily on a low-energy ethnographer to simply say the things the filmmaker needs said.
Osit’s approach is emotionally persuasive, but I wonder if he left some empirical cards on the table. He isn’t arguing for specific pity or mercy toward sexual predators, just a general sense of empathy. But perhaps a more journalistic approach could have yielded specific data on convictions that came out of To Catch a Predator, on rates of recidivism, or the specific types of treatment, not just punishment, that the “predators” received.
Clearly this was not the rhetorical strategy that Osit found most resonant for him, so maybe that’s the next step now that this conversational avenue has been established. Predators isn’t a documentary about closing the door on the To Catch a Predator legacy, but on seeing what shades of gray we can discover now that the door is ready to be reopened.
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Sign up for THR's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
