Early on in the Dave Bautista thriller “Trap House,” it occurred to me that its writers and director have an unusual understanding of what an “undercover” law officer is. Or maybe it’s just me. My intuition tells me that “undercover” DEA agents who hang out socially with each other and have kids who also hang out socially with each other is what one might call a security risk. And in point of fact, this movie’s script, by Tom O’Connor and Gary Scott Thompson, presents an object lesson in why fraternization of this sort can really work against you. Only none of the characters seems aware of this being the case.
As it happens, “Trap House” aims not to give the viewer too much time to contemplate these niceties. As Ray Seale, Bautista stalks around looking tough and soulful, and he gets even more soulful when he loses one of his colleagues in a raid gone slightly wrong. That colleague’s child, Jesse (Blu Del Barrio), is now an orphan and has to decamp to Spain, as one does.
This situation inspires the aforementioned teens, who are the spawn of the DEA squad and also high school best friends. They want to help out poor Jesse, so they contrive to boost some DEA equipment from their folks and knock over a trap house themselves. The ringleader is Ray’s kid, Cody (Ray’s partner Andre, played by Bobby Cannavale, who looks like he’d kill to be back at Sardi’s in “Blue Moon,” is fortunate in having no children)! This adds a slight frisson when Ray, surveying one robbed trap house (which is, in case you didn’t know, the place where drug dealers sometimes process and definitely store their wares), asks semi-rhetorically, “Who’d be dumb enough to steal from ‘em anyway?”
Director Michael Dowse has worked with Bautista before, in 2019’s misbegotten action-comedy attempt “Stuber.” He does better playing things straight here. One reason a viewer might not work up too much of an objection to the situational implausibilities is that the narrative moves along at a spanking pace, and the action is staged and shot at a pretty high level. Not quite, you know, peak Peter Hyams level, but pretty good. In terms of gnarly settings for the action, the movie also delivers—long stretches of highway, dusty underground tunnels, that sort of thing.
And the movie delivers one bit of possibly inadvertent comedy when a father-son reunion starts with some corporal punishment before cooler, heroic heads prevail (mainly to concoct a cover story that’ll prevent the entire cast from going to jail). Which includes another semi-rhetorical question about whether the “kids” are “done being morons.” Are kids EVER done being morons? As the twist-ending coda implies, perhaps they are…eventually.
