Trap House (2025) Review: Cartel Heist Goes Wrong

If you get past the more ludicrous parts of its premise, Trap House will keep you surprisingly invested – at least until the film decides to rush its ending.

I initially didn’t know what a trap house was and thought this would be a movie about a house full of traps, Home Alone style. I was soon proven wrong.

When one of the agents is killed in action, leaving his family in poverty, Cody decides to take matters into his own hands, and rob the cartel in order to financially support his friend.

Just from that synopsis, most of you will understand what the biggest hurdle with Trap House is: its premise is incredibly difficult to sell. I don’t know too well about how cartels operate, but the idea that a bunch of teens could steal from them in the first place already feels like the film is stretching the fabric of reality to the breaking point. In order to work, this story requires the cartel to be bigger idiots than Cody and his friends already are for even considering this idea.

However, to its credit, Trap House does everything in its power to make that premise as believable as possible. Firstly, the kids have access to intel and equipment thanks to their parents being DEA agents. In addition, they steal from a small, barely guarded trap house, instead of marching into Juarez and demanding the cartel to hand over their cash. Even then, the film takes extra care to show these kids are not professionals, and that their success is more of a lucky break than anything else.

On top of this, the movie takes time to lay out the teens’ motivations as well. They don’t decide to start robbing a cartel because they ran out of allowances. Instead, it’s because the DEA couldn’t support their friend’s family after his father was KIA. While the kids aren’t layered characters, there’s nothing obnoxious about their friendship. They feel like genuine buddies who look after each other. Thus, when they decide to kick off the events of the movie, while I still feel they’re morons, I can at least see them as sympathetic morons.

Should you want more solid realism in movies, then the aforementioned aspects might not be enough to sway you. However, it was enough to sway me just enough to get invested. And once I got behind the idea, the dynamic between the kids, the cartel, and the DEA got fairly interesting. Ray needs to figure out that his son’s robbing the cartel, while also making sure the cartel is brought down without more casualties. Cody keeps escalating the situation unknowingly, despite having genuinely good intentions. All this built good tension throughout the film that made me dread when things were going to go south.

However, it is when things went south that Trap House started to lose me a little again. When Cody and his gang initially pull off their first heist, it is written as understandably as possible. However, towards the third act, Cody decides to escalate the situation even further with yet another heist, in order to provide money to get away from their parents, even though literally everyone else agrees it’s best to quit while they’re ahead.

The film tries to provide a character-related reason once more for this decision, but this time it is far more flimsy. Cody supposedly has a strained relationship with Ray after his mother died. However, not only is that backstory not explained thoroughly enough, but throughout the movie, there’s no scene that really cements that Cody has a reason to hate his father to the point where he wants to move away immediately. There’s a certain amount of awkwardness between them, and Ray imposes some rules on Cody. But we never see him enforcing those rules to the point where Cody’s patience would snap; certainly not to the point where going after more drug money would make sense. So Cody’s rebelliousness comes off more as unlikeable impulsiveness rather than a sympathetic motivation.

This lack of properly established conflict between Cody and Ray makes the ending problematic as well. Things expectedly go south and Cody ends up facing the cartel himself. When Ray arrives on scene, he confronts Cody, but other than an embrace and saying “I love you,” he doesn’t say anything else about what Cody did. The ramifications of what Cody did, how it affected his friends, or any consequences he must face, all of that is glossed over for a happy father-son relationship that doesn’t feel earned.

This lack of believable character dynamic is important because as established, Trap House already struggles from the get go in terms of realism. Thus, character and emotional establishment is the way to get viewers immersed into the story, which it does for the most part. However, once that emotional immersion is broken, then your attention will go straight back to how ludicrous this whole situation is, and how much of an idiot Cody is being.

A well-made movie isn’t one that is flawless. It is a film that smartly distracts from its flaws by emphasizing its strengths. Trap House almost succeeds in that, but loses track of its strengths by the ending, when it left me feeling like a raincloud covered the horizon right at the moment of sunset.

Trap House will be released in US theatres on November 14, 2025.