‘The Family Plan’ Review — Mark Wahlberg’s Movie Is as Fun as a Divorce

The Big Picture

• The Family Plan, starring Mark Wahlberg, is an obnoxious and tonally confused mess.
• The concept of a skilled assassin becoming a family man had potential, but it was poorly executed.
• The movie struggles with its identity, trying to be both a zany comedy and a gritty action film, resulting in a lackluster experience.

Did you know that Mark Wahlberg is starring in a new action-comedy movie on Apple TV+ this weekend? It’s probably for the best if you didn’t as The Family Plan is an obnoxious, strung out, and tonally confused mess. It shouldn’t be too shocking, considering some of Wahlberg’s other movie choices as of late, but it also makes us wonder if we were too harsh on Father Stu. It was a forgettable movie, but it at least had the A-lister giving one of his best performances in years.

Wahlberg is, without a doubt, a talented actor. To say otherwise is to say you haven’t seen films like The Departed or Boogie Nights, but The Family Plan falls right in line with some of the actor’s other recent choices. It’s not quite as poor as the dreadful Infinite, but it’s not as mildly amusing as Uncharted (which wasn’t great to begin with).

What Is ‘The Family Plan’ About?

Dan (Wahlberg) is the ultimate family man, almost to a fault. He lives a pretty mundane, but perfectly happy life in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. He has a beautiful wife, Jessica (Michelle Monaghan), plus three kids in the rebellious wannabe activist Nina (Zoe Colleti), gaming prodigy Kyle (Van Crosby), and newborn baby Max. Dan has just one shocking secret: he’s a former highly trained assassin and he has left some major baggage behind. This includes ditching his former employer and father figure McCaffrey (Ciarán Hinds).

Just as his family life begins to fall apart, as Jessica grows tired of his mundanity and his kids are rebelling, Dan’s killer past finally catches up with him as he’s attacked by a rogue assassin while shopping for diapers at the grocery store. Knowing that his loved ones are in danger, he packs the family’s bags and takes them on a road trip to Las Vegas. As the violence and chaos get closer, the greater the chance that his family will learn his darkest secret.

‘The Family Plan’ Wastes Its High Concept

High concept movies can be great. Some of the greatest blockbusters of all time are high concept movies like Jaws and Inception, and while the premise of The Family Plan may not be as grand as those movies, it is still amusing enough. A skilled assassin leaves his life of crime behind to become a family man. It sounds like a combination between John Wick and The Pacifier starring Vin Diesel. Throw in a movie star like Wahlberg and there’s some potential there. David Coggeshall‘s script has some fun ideas. It’s just too bad it’s executed quite poorly.

Dexter Fletcher, the director behind Apple TV+’s Ghosted, revealed in an interview that streamers have certain guidelines for filmmakers to follow when making big-budget movies. Director Simon Cellan Jones might not have the same exciting filmography as somebody like Fletcher, so it is easy to see how Apple may have pushed him around. The unfortunate truth is that The Family Plan could have been a fun action-comedy. It shares a lot in common with the Bob Odenkirk-led action flick Nobody, but while that movie was able to have impressive action, a pitch-black sense of humor, and the sheer amusement of Saul Goodman ruthlessly murdering gangsters; all The Family Plan has going for it is a charismatic cast. Wahlberg and Monaghan can only take you so far when everything else feels superficial and bland.

The Family Plan is the kind of movie that likes throwing out plot twists left and right, believing they’ll shock the audience, but nothing works. If a recognizable actor or actress pops up for one scene and then doesn’t show up again until a random moment in the third, you can see where the movie is going. It also doesn’t help that the film is full of questionable subplots, including Dan’s son Kyle secretly being a celebrity video game streamer. The movie dedicates several montages to him playing an Overwatch knockoff as if that’s supposed to be cinematic. If we wanted to watch a teenage kid playing video games, we could just have gone on Twitch. We wouldn’t be watching a new Mark Wahlberg movie.

When the action does occur, it’s chopped to pieces by frantic editing. Remember when Taken 3 had 15 camera cuts to show Liam Neeson hopping over a fence? Well, the editing in The Family Plan isn’t too far off from that. Nearly every single punch thrown or stunt is accompanied by a jarring quick cut, making some of the action feel unintelligible. Wahlberg’s better than this and it’s not like he hasn’t thrown punches on screen before in films like The Fighter and 2 Guns.

‘The Family Plan’ Has an Identity Crisis

Wahlberg and Monaghan seem like they were genuinely having a blast with The Family Plan. Their chemistry is sweet, a little awkward, but intentionally so, and they work extremely well together. While the script makes their children extremely unlikable and grating, Colleti and Crosby also still do well with what they’re given. They all feel like a believable family unit. It’s just that the movie they’re trapped inside doesn’t fully know whether it wants to be a zany road trip comedy or a hard-edged action-comedy. Some truly brutal moments of violence take place within this flick, but they feel so off-putting when just earlier there’s a freeze-frame joke showing everyone’s devastated reaction as Wahlberg chucks everybody’s smartphones out the window. Nothing seems to gel together.

There’s a sweetness buried deep inside The Family Plan, but it gets completely smothered beneath all the jarring and poorly cut action and weird subplots that lead nowhere. Outside a few chuckles and a likable cast, there’s nothing that makes it stand out. It might be par for the course from what you would expect from a streaming movie starring Wahlberg, but this latest feels like no one was even trying.

Rating: 3/10

The Family Plan is available to stream on Apple TV+ in the U.S. starting December 15.

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