Predators (2025)
- 3 minutes ago
- 3 min read
A dismal, woke excuse for a documentary that inexplicably takes the side of men preying on underage kids, PREDATORS is a self-righteous mess that drowns in its own slimy, bizarre posturing.
NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series on Dateline was a ratings bonanza wrapped in a cautionary tale. It was such a huge hit that host Chris Hansen became a part of the national zeitgeist.
We'd all tune in every week to watch Hansen work with local police to set up stings for predators seeking sex with underage children.
The shows popularity even became fodder for satire and comedy shows. If you're in a house and Chris Hansen walks into the kitchen, you've made some seriously twisted life choices.
The first twenty minutes of the film is a decent recap of the show's origins, how it was filmed and just how big it became in America.
I remember watching it and, along with everyone else I know across the country, loving watching these twisted morons get busted. It's made very clear to all these felons that the girls or boys are underage. That doesn't stop these guys from showing up to meet them at their house loaded down with everything from condoms and booze to candy while they thing Mom and Dad are away.
After Hansen talked to them, the idiots usually assumed they were free to go and waltzed out the front door to a police team ready to take them down.
Of course, there were a couple of these morons that you just had to shake your head at, too young or just too damn stupid to grasp the consequences.
But that didn't lessen the impact of what they did in recorded texts, conversations and on camera for anyone I know.
But wait.
Director David Ost has a different perspective. He seems to take offense to what Hansen and the police did. In the ultimate showcase of toxic empathy, he feels bad for those poor little sexual predators. Ost's performative compassion conveniently ignores the damage to real children in the grasp of these lowlifes.
WTF?
The film spirals into a very uncomfortable take, diving deep into one of the arrested men who commits suicide. If only Ost took the same time to dig into the harm that sexual predators cause in young lives. But no, he's got an agenda and spends the last hour of the film trying to convince you that these poor predators deserve your pity.
No thanks, I'll focus on the rights of the victims.
Ost creates a convoluted ending in which he invites an unsuspecting Chris Hansen for an interview in Manhattan. He sets up cameras outside the office to show Hansen arriving. Oh I get it! Its a super clever, meta take to put Hansen in the same position as the subjects of his hit show! See! He's pulling up outside for the meeting while the cameras wait inside for his ambush. Oh, how smart! How clever!
HOW STUPID.
The staging of this entire sequence is so awkward, painful and self indulgent that you can feel Ost begging for artistic recognition. Poor Hansen sits there waiting for something smart to be asked, but Ost is too busy trying to capture what he thinks is a "gotcha" moment, that the film is aimless, boring and offensive.
The only person I felt bad for was Chris Hansen, getting bamboozled into wasting an afternoon with this talentless hack.
I hope you at least got some lemonade, Chris.
Ost should have called this crap "Why Pedophiles Aren't THAT Bad", to express his real message and also so I could have saved the 96 minutes I wasted watching this offensive garbage that lands with a thud from a light year outside of left field.
PREDATORS gets an F.
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