It’s Teen Hormones vs. Murderous Cartels in Loopy Actioner Trap House

There’s something oddly satisfying about seeing the way that dramatic silver tones have infiltrated the beard of Dave Bautista in new action flick Trap House as it reflects the harsh fluorescent lights of a police interrogation room. It’s about time, most likely, that the 56-year-old, ex-WWE star stopped playing immovable titans in anything close to their “prime”–he got a later start on a Hollywood career, but has already managed to vastly exceed the dramatic successes of other former wrestlers like Dwayne Johnson and John Cena, all while still making time for paycheck-grubbing, lower-budget action fare along the way. And hey, if he’s playing the father of a graduating high school student, as he is here, then there’s ample potential for Bautista to play a (still jacked) father coming to grips with the fact that he won’t always be there to shield the kid with his impenetrable wall of muscle. It’s nice to see that side of the action star beginning to evolve in director Michael Dowse’s film, even if said film is by and large just an assembly of every SWAT team/drug cartel cliche you’ve ever encountered, with an added twist of Red Dawn for good measure.

Bautista is playing first-name-only professional bruiser Ray, a secretive DEA agent flanked by partner Wash (a sadly underutilized Bobby Cannavale) as co-leads of some sort of anti-drug, anti-cartel task force that is rooting out drug smuggling over the U.S.-Mexico border. Our opening moments set the tone as the unit busts a gas station front for a drug tunnel that apparently runs all the way to Mexico, with Bautista doing the requisite outrunning of tunnel explosions before the group is ambushed by snipers firing all the way from another country, in what must be noted is a rather impressive bit of marksmanship. The death of one of the agents in this manner throws the plot into motion, as the high school student kids of the DEA agents decide to take it upon themselves to both extract a little justice and provide for their friend who just lost his father.

That’s right–Bautista and Cannavale may be front and center on the Trap House poster, but the adults here are playing a more reactive role as the younger generation takes charge on moving the story along. They’re led by single father Ray’s son Cody (Jack Champion, of the Avatar franchise), an impetuous high school wrestler who has somehow managed to assemble a friend group in which each and every member is the son or daughter of one of the DEA agents on Ray’s team. Is it a particularly good idea for all of these kids to form a clique that is bonded by their parents having secret identities and being marked for death by cartel assassins? Probably not, but it does give them the kind of tangential, inside information on law enforcement activity, intelligence, tactics and equipment that they need in order to start pulling some ill-advised raids of their own! Trap House thus evolves into a cat-and-mouse game between the cartel murder squads on one side, the valorous DEA squad on the other, and the idiotically overconfident kids caught in the middle.

This squad of 20-something actors playing high schoolers, in keeping with the ancient tradition, manages to be a fairly appealing bunch, and from their chemistry Trap House draws most of its charm. In addition to Champion’s Cody, the diverse little band is rounded out by Deni (Sophia Lillis), Yvonne (Whitney Peak) and Kyle (Zaire Adams), each of whom has basically inherited through familial ties some kind of expertise in DEA operations. Their excited planning of a trap house (which is a term for a drug den, FYI) raid has an amusing let’s-put-on-a-show energy, recalling something perhaps like Bart Layton’s American Animals in its enthusiasm but lack of genuine preparation, while cribbing from the comforting cinematic language of the heist film. Naturally, things go south quickly as the kids attempt to steal enough from the cartels in order to altruistically provide for their other friend who lost his father, but getting a taste for the thrills and payoffs of this line of work is equally intoxicating, for Cody in particular. It isn’t long before he’s insisting on more, ever-more-dangerous and poorly advised plans, and the kids are going from “steal from a house with one guard,” to “hijack armored truck and engage in high speed chase with armed cartel goons.” What could go wrong?

Cody, noted greedy fool though he may be, is the film’s real heart, and Champion sells his ambivalence well as the house of cards starts to collapse around him, and as his musclebound father begins to suspect that his own son may be involved in the cartel business, all while Cody also attempts to juggle an emerging romantic relationship with new girl Teresa (Inde Navarrette), who may be more than she seems. Trap House threatens at times to take on more tragic overtones as he embraces the feverish defiance that leads him and his crew to take on more dangerous tasks, driven by repressed grief over his mother’s death and the compulsion to respond with symbolic gestures of autonomy. One wonders: Just how many people is Cody going to get killed? This unspoken threat serves the action sequences well in the film’s back half, infusing their slick gunplay with more tension than they would otherwise have on their own. Simultaneously, we nurse the thread of what Bautista’s Ray will do when he finally confirms his son’s scheme–bust him, or cover up for his own blood? Will Cody ultimately drag his father down with him?

Trap House manages to be fitfully thrilling, pulling off a villain reveal at one point that amusingly but derivatively cribs from Spider-Man: Homecoming in particular, but it stumbles to some degree in its clumsy and tonally scattershot portrayal of American law enforcement. It’s difficult to say what if anything Dowse and writers Gary Scott Thompson and Tom O’Connor want to say about the DEA, swinging wildly between a depiction that feels like fetishization of Ray’s unit as commando superheroes, to in the next breath telling us that the agency won’t even take care of the family of an officer murdered by the cartels. Given that, one wonders why Ray chose such an inherently dangerous, thankless line of law enforcement in the first place. Did he just want to be part of a unit that, in nearly every action scene, shoots first and leaves a trail of Mexican bodies in its wake? Perhaps extrajudicial killings are just their own reward, for men of a certain age. It’s one of the things that makes the generational divide here stand out, as Cody’s more naive crew exclusively uses less-than-lethal armament, despite it putting them in greater risk.

In the end, the dangerous interplay between its three little factions, the believable camaraderie of the high school crew, and the terse but loving interaction of Ray and Cody in particular, make for enough of a nucleus for Trap House to overcome some of its shakier scriptural elements. It even attempts to lay a little foundation for Trap House 2: Electric Trapaloo, but like the finer points of an escape plan that doesn’t involve driving your own car to the crime scene, I expect that will be a little bit beyond its grasp.

Director: Michael Dowse
Writers: Gary Scott Thompson, Tom O’Connor
Stars: Dave Bautista, Jack Champion, Sophia Lillis, Tony Dalton, Whitney Peak, Inde Navarrette, Zaire Adams, Kate del Castillo, Bobby Cannavale
Release date: Nov. 14, 2025

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.

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