Trap House, 2025.
Directed by Michael Dowse.
Starring Dave Bautista, Bobby Cannavale, Kate del Castillo, Jack Champion, Sophia Lillis, Whitney Peak, Tony Dalton, Inde Navarrette, Zaire Adams, and Blu del Barrio.
SYNOPSIS:
A DEA agent and his partner pursue thieves: their own rebellious teens, who began robbing the cartel using their parents’ tactics and classified intel.
Wasting a rather genius socioeconomically poignant premise, director Michael Dowse’s Trap House (from a screenplay by Gary Scott Thompson and Tom O’Connor) gradually slides into generic thriller stupidity, complete with obvious eye-rolling betrayals and obnoxious characterization. It’s a film that begins as if it will build to making some point about the dispiriting lack of benefits for those who die defending America, but that’s actually only using that as a launching pad for family and friendship drama within forgettable action that also strays from what’s actually interesting here.
The film follows more than a band of DEA agents cracking down on cartel operations, but also their respective teenagers, who have become tight friends over the years. They all know that their fathers are in a dangerous line of work, but that also doesn’t stop them from managing those feelings with a sense of humor and talking about them the same way most kids that age would talk about their dads. It’s not that these teenagers don’t understand the reality of the situation, but that it doesn’t become real until one of the fathers dies on a routine bust, leaving the family with no financial assistance, causing them to move hours away, separating the friend group.
This prompts Cody (Jack Champion), who already has a bit of a fractured relationship with his father, Ray (Dave Bautista, reliably solid even when the story around him falls apart), in the wake of him becoming overprotective following losing mom to a terminal illness, to start asking some tough but necessary questions about working a job that essentially doesn’t care about life or death and has no interest in setting up the remaining members of a family with sustainable benefits. We know characters like Ray: it’s a job to them, and all they know, but they do love their families.
However, Trap House refreshingly zigs toward following these teenagers (with Sophia Lillis, Blu del Barro, Whitney Peak, and others in the roles), taking Cody’s lead in a different approach to fighting the cartel: stealing their money by infiltrating various trap houses or robbing armored vehicles. Nobly, they want to fund their friend with enough money for his family to live, although that doesn’t mean Cody will quit while he is ahead.
Since these are also untrained teenagers, the methods involve nonlethal weapons and are unsurprisingly messy in execution, with numerous close calls. The stakes are felt in these sequences, and the circumstances allow for some creative approaches to familiar action sequences. Admittedly, this is silly, but one is comfortable taking it seriously for the dynamics at play between the parents, the unlikely rebellious teenagers, and the cartel, all of whom are on a collision course with one another.
Unfortunately, the film is also littered with superfluous subplots, ranging from Cody finding a girlfriend in his recently transferred new student science lab partner Teresa (Inde Navarrette), incessantly whining about a father for looking out for his well-being (Ray is not necessarily overwhelming about his protection and generally reasonable toward his son), and some inner workings of the cartel as they try to deduce who is hitting their various locations. By devoting time to these aspects, the film slips away from the interesting socio-economic purpose that underlies the conversation between father and son, becoming overtly generic, more concerned with tropes and stale action beats. Trap House traps its unique ideas in favor of nonsense.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
