Trap House 2025 Movie Review
Wrestlers becoming actors used to be looked down upon in the days when Hulk Hogan was trying to make it big in Hollywood. That’s not a problem today, however, when three of WWE’s biggest stars from this century in Dwayne Johnson, John Cena, and Dave Bautista have all become major stars in the film world. With roles in movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Knock at the Cabin, Bautista is arguably the best of the trio, so how does his latest, Trap House, compare? Directed by Michael Dowse, who also collaborated with Bautista in Stuber, and starring quality names such as Jack Champion, Sophia Lillis, Tony Dalton, and Bobby Cannavale, Trap House has the ingredients to make a fun action movie, and although it is fun enough for what it is, its lead finds himself in a project beneath his talent.
Trap House takes place in Tuscon on the Mexican border with Ray Seale (Bautista) as a DEA agent. One day, during a raid on a trap house where low-level drug dealers live, everything goes wrong when a DEA agent is killed by a sniper in the cartel. If you think you know where this is going next, Trap House succeeds by doing something different. This isn’t a movie about a badass Bautista getting revenge, but about the teenage children of the DEA agents. They all hang out together at school, and with one of them now fatherless and having to move away, Ray’s son, Cody (Champion) comes up with a plan: he and his friends are going to use the knowledge they got from their parents to rob a trap house so they can give their friend the money.
Cody, Deni (Lillis), Yvonne (Whitney Peak), and Kyle (Zaire Adams) treat it all as fun at first, with Cody falling in love with the new girl at school, Teresa (Inde Navarrette), at the same time, but greed leads these kids to quickly get in over their heads with the wrong people. The cartel is led by Benito Cabrera (Dalton) and his sister, Natalia (Kate del Castillo), who are determined to unmask and kill both the DEA agents and whoever is stealing from them. If the stakes aren’t raised enough, just what will Ray do when he discovers that his own child has got himself wrapped up in something deadly that he can’t get out of?
Dave Bautista spent the early years of his acting career doing paint-by-numbers action movies that you’ve seen a million times. Take a look at the poster for Trap House, showing Dave with a gun drawn and pointed off-screen, and you’ll assume you’re in for more of the same, but the best part of the movie is that it is indeed a trap and not what you think it is. Rather than being a simple revenge flick, it’s about what heroes accidentally pass down to their kids, and how those kids, because of their youth, think they are invincible and can easily do what their highly trained parents do.
The plot of Trap House is a bit far-fetched, and if you’re going to enjoy it you have to let it go. All of these DEA agents are supposedly undercover, but yet their kids all know that their high school classmates are the sons and daughters of these people, so they form a clique, and it’s never outed among their peers? Sure, if you say so. What’s also hard to wrap your head around is the inciting incident that sets Cody on the wrong path. This happens when Ray, who has Cody in the car with him, gets a call to go to a just-brought down trap house. He lets his boy tag along, where he’s allowed to walk inside the home packed with cops (a crime scene filled with evidence!). When Cody sees bags of drug money being collected, a light bulb goes off: he and his friends will steal money from another trap house to give to their friend, easy-peasy.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at all of that, but the script by Gary Scott Thompson and Tom O’Connor rises above its confines. The kids don’t have a lot of weight to their characters, and their dialogue is often uninspired and tells too much, but the writers know how to craft tension. Combine that with Michael Dowse’s direction, and you have a movie where building suspense is more important than a gunfight every ten minutes. Trap House is unbearably tense at times as you wait for something bad to happen to the protagonists. Surely, not all of them are making it out of this alive, right? Although the end of Trap House wraps things up way too neatly and quickly, an unseen twist does a good job of taking it to the next level. Now if only its biggest star had more to do.
In the wrestling world, Dave Bautista was both the popular good guy and the menacing heel. He could do it all on the WWE stage, and he’s done the same in Hollywood. You want a hilarious superhero, he’s got you covered. Need a creepy villain, not a problem whatsoever. How about a compelling supporting role, such as in The Last Showgirl? Sign him up! But with his rugged looks, muscles, and charisma, he’ll always be able to play the cool action star. The problem with Trap House is that he’s held down and doesn’t get to do much of that. This could have been a smart choice, because he’s such a good actor that he’s way more interesting talking than he is holding a gun, but in Trap House he’s only doing the basics, like many of the big names.
Tony Dalton was scary as hell as Lalo Salamanca in Better Call Saul, but it’s both exciting and disappointing to see him pop up in Trap House. He’s so talented, it’s a bit limiting as he’s playing a Mexican drug boss again, especially when he gets little to do besides being an over-the-top action movie bad guy who screams at everyone and acts menacing. Bobby Cannavale is, of course, immensely gifted too, but all he does in Trap House is play the “friend” role to Ray. Take him out, and you lose absolutely nothing except for someone for Ray to interact with. Trap House has some highly respectable talent, so it’s a shame that they’re not asked to do more than the bare minimum.
Dave Bautista is the most disappointing, and it’s not because he’s bad by any means, but because he’s too restrained. We get long looks of Ray, a widower, looking sad, him staring off into the distance thinking, or looking at Cody, feeling things but saying nothing. Then it’s off to an action scene, rinse, and repeat. He almost seems bored, as if he’s doing what he can with what he’s given, but he knows that this is filler in between more intriguing work. Credit should be given for Trap House’s attempt to pull him back and let him share the screen with others, but in back-to-back movies (In the Lost Lands was beyond horrible), we’re not getting that guy who can easily grab a viewer by the collar and pull them in with his abilities. Dune, Glass Onion, and the TV series See get the best out of him. Trap House is a fun enough time worth watching, but it traps its star and doesn’t let him out.
