Trap House

The Cartel Breakfast Club

Not far into Michael Dowse’s *Trap House*, the movie more or less dares you to decide whether you’re coming with it. Either you buy the premise or you spend the rest of the runtime resisting it. And the premise is wild: imagine somebody smashed the suburban-kid energy of *The Goonies* into the border-war mood of *Sicario* and dropped the result in El Paso. On paper it sounds ridiculous, and honestly, on screen it remains pretty ridiculous. What caught me off guard is that Dowse doesn’t play the absurdity for a knowing wink. He shoots big chunks of it like a straight-faced story about grief, and that clash of tones sometimes creates a weird little charge the film doesn’t always deserve.



Dowse has made his name in blood-spattered comedy before, from *Goon* to *Stuber*, so the relative seriousness here stands out. The story follows Cody (Jack Champion) and a group of high school friends who happen to be the children of elite DEA agents. Their solution to helping a friend whose DEA father died in a disastrous raid is to start robbing cartel stash houses using their parents’ surveillance intel and non-lethal gear. It is, to put it mildly, bananas. Also probably the sort of plan that would collapse under five minutes of legal scrutiny. A *MovieWeb* critic summed up the movie’s trap neatly: it "is too silly to take seriously, but then plays things too seriously to have much fun with." That’s the whole balancing act, and the wire is always wobbling.

Still, Dave Bautista keeps the film from floating completely away. As Cody’s father Ray Seale, he continues this very satisfying transition from blunt-force heavy to something sadder and more human. Bautista doesn’t march through the movie; he carries himself like a man whose body is trying to shield a damaged center. His wife has recently died, and the grief shows up physically in the way his enormous shoulders pitch forward, as if bracing for another blow. When Ray learns his son is connected to the cartel robberies, Bautista doesn’t reach for flashy rage. His face just collapses. What lands is not fury so much as the terror of a father realizing the violence he spent his life managing has seeped right into his home.



The heist scenes work best when Dowse refuses to make the kids look cool. Their first big run through a suburban stash house is tense because they’re amateurs, not prodigies. Sophia Lillis and Whitney Peak fumble with night-vision goggles that don’t quite fit. They knock things over. They move too fast, then freeze up. The sound mix leans into their breathing, turning dumb luck into the thing that keeps them alive. That clumsiness is the smartest grounding device the movie has. It makes the silliness sweat a little.

Across from them, Tony Dalton and Kate del Castillo play the cartel siblings running the El Paso side of things. Dalton is exactly the kind of grinning menace you want in a movie like this, carrying over some of that same unsettling charm he used so well in *Better Call Saul*. The trouble is that the script barely gives him time to settle before the bullets start flying. By the third act, the movie more or less abandons its mournful family drama and does what action thrillers usually do: it lights up the screen with gunfire and lets emotional texture fend for itself.



Whether that counts as a betrayal or just basic Friday-night entertainment probably depends on what you came for. *Trap House* never settles on being either a hard-edged border thriller or a young-adult adventure with corpses in the background. You can see the seams the whole time. Even so, it has a ragged charm, and a lot of that comes from the quiet decency Bautista brings with him. Once again, he makes a huge body built for damage feel heartbreakingly vulnerable.