It’s tough being a DEA agent. The pay isn’t great, the working conditions are brutal and the job is highly dangerous. And even worse, you have to worry about your kid conducting illicit raids on drug traffickers.
Wait, what?
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Hard as it may be to believe, that’s the absurd premise of the new action-thriller film reuniting Dave Bautista and director Michael Dowse, who previously collaborated on Stuber. Now that buddy comedy was absurd, but it has nothing on Trap House, in which Bautista plays Ray, a Texas-based DEA agent whose son goes rogue along with several of his high school friends. Amazingly, very little of this is played for laughs, except of the unintentional variety.
It’s a credit to Bautista’s big-lug charisma that the film goes down as easily as it does. While the actor has demonstrated that he’s fully capable of more ambitious assignments, he handles his prosaic chores here very well and even manages to provide some emotional depth to his character, a widowed father attempting to juggle his demanding professional and parental responsibilities.
Nonetheless, it’s a losing battle, with the plot inanities piling on rapidly. The story begins with Ray and his genial partner Andre (Bobby Cannavale, underused) spearheading a raid on a gas station that houses a tunnel direct to Mexico. In the ensuing chaos, snipers from across the border (they must be very good shots) kill one of the agents.
It turns out that the slain agent’s son Jesse (Blu del Barrio) is a schoolmate of Ray’s son Cody (Jack Champion, Avatar: The Way of Water). To get revenge for the killing and provide much needed money for Jesse and his now widowed mother, Cody and his classmates (Sophia Lillis, Whitney Peak, Zaire Adams) start a GoFundMe campaign.
No, not really. Instead, they do the much more sensible thing. Namely, going after the drug traffickers themselves by raiding Mexican cartel trap houses and robbing their mules, using equipment borrowed from their parents including night-vision goggles and beanbag shotguns. Their first raid proves successful but they only net $497, leading them to go bigger and bolder with their illicit operations while an increasingly befuddled Ray and Andre wonder what the hell is going on.
Naturally, none of this sits well with the cartel leader, Benito (Tony Dalton, who has some experience with this sort of thing since he played the villainous Salamanca on Better Call Saul). Or with Benito’s highly ambitious, even more ruthless sister Natalia (Kate del Castillo, who also has some related experience that you can easily research for yourselves).
The sort of film in which the bad guy declares that he wants to “flush out the rats!” and makes one underling shoot another, Trap House gets increasingly loopy as it goes along — especially in its late plot twist involving Cody’s burgeoning romance with another classmate (Inde Navarrette) that just goes to show that relationships can be risky physically as well as emotionally.
Director Dowse handles the action sequences proficiently, if not very excitingly, while screenwriters Tom O’Connor and Gary Scott Thompson can’t seem to decide if they want to go fully gritty or fully comedic. They land closer to the former, with the result that Trap House never achieves a coherent tone. The fact that it ends with a tease of a sequel represents the sort of optimism you can only find in the film business.
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