‘The Family Plan’ Review
There’s a certain expectation to assume from films like The Family Plan. An action-comedy with a father and loving husband who has hidden his past as an assassin from his family until it lands back on his front doorstep is not an original concept. However, it’s got room for a few laughs, and maybe some sturdy action sequences - plus you can never count out a cast from taking a simple concept and selling it far better than it deserves. It’s the fact that Simon Cellan Jones’ film is told almost completely straight-faced that leaves the final product in a confusing state that emphasizes the fact that it is, indeed, just another product of the streaming age. Despite some beats here and there that work far better than they should, The Family Plan is a slog to get through as it goes through the motions and can’t seem to muster any laughs or thrills - just utter bewilderment.
On paper, The Family Plan should be an easy mark for fans of action comedies. Watching Dan Morgan (Mark Wahlberg) rope his family into a road trip to escape his past as an assassin should lead to a series of hijinx. Instead, it’s surprisingly more character-focused than one would expect. A spontaneous trip to Las Vegas, under the guise of a family vacation but is actually to acquire passports to leave the country, is exactly what Dan’s wife, Jessica (Michelle Monaghan), has been looking for from her milquetoast and routine-based husband. Their son, Kyle (Van Crosby), isn’t as thrilled because he could be at home playing Valorant on Twitch to his massive amount of followers, but there’s an eSports tournament happening in Vegas that he’ll have to sneak out to in order to attend so his Dad isn’t aware he still plays violent video games. Meanwhile, Nina (Zoe Colletti) is excited to visit her long-distance boyfriend at the college she plans to attend, instead of Stanford University like her parents wish. Oh yeah, and there’s a baby named Max too, but he’s just there to witness Dan’s violence and make funny faces because he can’t speak.
As a result of the multiple threads - all of which are more about people realizing that the double lives they lead, or the other lives they wish they had - David Coggeshall’s screenplay feels like it’s trying to do something substantial with its characters but at the end of the day is beholden to a formula. In the background of these character moments is Dan’s former boss, McCaffrey (Ciarán Hinds), chasing him and his family down. Dan’s plight seems to be an inability to tell his family that he used to be an assassin, but the clock is ticking and he can only hide his family from the truth for so long. For what it’s worth, Wahlberg is surprisingly solid at selling the fact that he cares more about his family’s well-being than he does about his past blowing up in his face. As he nonchalantly takes out bad guy after bad guy, Dan is still someone who concerns himself with whether his family is alright and shielded from the violence.
It’s just that almost everything seems sterilized from the action to the comedy as if it’s been tested on focus groups until the end result is the safest, most uninteresting sequences of “guy does cool things while still being a Dad.” Tonally it’s completely baffling because again, the film does not seem self-aware, but it’s almost not doing anything wholly original to justify playing it straight, and it’s still reaching for comedic bits that just never land. There’s an inspired moment of Dan spraying the inside of a motorcyclist’s helmet with milk from a baby bottle as they try to attack him in a high-speed chase and a pole vaulting bit that has a shockingly vicious touch to it, but it’s that dichotomy of family-friendly action and jarringly brutal kills that accentuates why The Family Plan never seems to find any solid footing.
Instead, I spent most of the film’s runtime wondering what exactly is the film trying to be because it’s not landing any of its emotional beats nor is it particularly funny or exciting. It seems like a case of a screenplay that wants to be a little weird, but with direction that plays it safe. By the time it actually reaches the more substantial action beats and tries to course-correct its tonal incongruities into a much more familiar template, The Family Plan is out of gas and out of runway to make any of it matter. Buried deep in the film might be a vision for a heartwarming story about a father trying to outrun his violent past for a happier family life, but every time it seems to appreciate its characters, it does so in the banalest of ways. It’s a complete misfire, barely held together by having the basic structure expected of
