Dave Bautista's Bizarre 2025 Action Movie Is Blowing Up Netflix's Top Charts

Dave Bautista has followed in the footsteps of other wrestlers like John Cena and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in pursuing an acting career. His breakout role came in 2014 when he played Drax the Destroyer in "Guardians of the Galaxy" and subsequent Marvel Cinematic Universe entries. Since then, although Bautista has sought to prove his worth as an actor in various genres, he's largely been playing to type in action films such as "Afterburn," "My Spy," and a strange new film on Netflix called "Trap House." While arguably one of the worst and most bizarre he's put out so far, it has nevertheless been topping Netflix charts, currently ranking as the second most-watched U.S. movies on the platform.

"Trap House" follows a group of Texas-based DEA agents, led in part by Ray Seale (Bautista), and their conveniently high school-aged kids, all of whom are under cover and must be careful about revealing why they're so close to the U.S.-Mexico border. Following the shooting of one of the DEA agents/parents, his wife and son, Jesse (Blu del Barrio), are forced to move. So naturally, the de facto leader of the teen group, Cody Seale (Jack Champion), decides that they should "borrow" their parents' military-grade equipment and rob a trap house.

"Trap House" feels like an action film set in 2025 written by aliens in 2125. Despite a solid cast including the never-categorizable Bobby Cannavale and "It" actress Sophia Lillis, nothing about the film feels naturally occurring. An aggressive, confident sense of morality pervades that makes it feel like right-wing propaganda at times were it not so clearly pro-trans. The main antagonists, an insidious family behind one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico, are cartoonishly unfeeling except in matters of money and blood, and there is no ethical probing into the downside of America's violent war on drugs. 

In a word, every emotional beat of "Trap House" feels contrived, and the actual plot fails to walk the line between compelling and bizarre. Either the audience must suspend their disbelief and accept that a group of mostly untrained teenagers could steal heavily secured DEA equipment and run head-first into a trap house with no plan, or, this is actually something that's possible, in which case there probably shouldn't be a movie about it hovering at the top of Netflix's hot list. It comes close to being considered one of the worst action movies ever made, but thankfully, Dave Bautista remains an actor worth rooting for.