THE FAMILY PLAN - Mark Reviews Movies

The Family Plan, Apple TV+

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 15, 2023

Why limit oneself to one generic setup when you could try three or four of them? That seems to be the philosophy of the screenplay for The Family Plan, which takes a familiar but somewhat promising idea and clearly doesn't know what to do with it. When the ideas don't come, just add some other ones, apparently.

The central idea of David Coggeshall's screenplay is that a seemingly ordinary man—with a happy family and a nice house and a regular job—has a dark, secret past. Yes, Dan Morgan (Mark Wahlberg) is no mere used car salesman, living in a pleasant suburb with his wife and their three children. Almost two decades prior, he had been working as a covert assassin for the government and/or some shady private entity. After escaping that life, he met Jessica (a game Michelle Monaghan, who is more delightful than her thankless role requires), settled down, and now finds himself perfectly content.

The rub, of course, is that the wife and the two teenage kids—as well as the third kid, a toddler, although that should go without saying—have no idea what Dan did in that former life. When he's discovered by his former colleagues, thanks to a stray social media post, Dan has to pack up, grab his family, and get them to safety—all without them knowing his plan or his previous job until he's good and ready to tell them.

In theory, this is a solid setup for a screwball comedy of close calls, intentional deception, and improvisation, but if anyone here is trying to make that movie, it's certainly not in the finished product. Oh, there are plenty of close calls and active lies and necessary improvising, as a gang of anonymous killers hunt Dan and his unwitting clan, but director Simon Cellan Jones primarily seems to care about the action, ignoring the comedic potential of this material.

To be fair to the director, it's not as if Coggeshall provides him or the actors with many jokes of much merit in the first place. It doesn't help that Wahlberg, who can be funny in a dry and deadpan way that would theoretically suit this material, doesn't seem to know he's in a comedy. He plays Dan straight and a bit too cool for all the peril in which he finds himself and, more importantly, into which he has put the people he loves.

Take the first action sequence, when Dan discovers that the wicked people from his past have uncovered his new identity and location. It's set at a grocery store, as Dan wanders the aisles with his very young son in a carrier strapped to his chest, and sure enough, someone is stalking and readying to attack him. The setup is clever, since Dan has to defend himself and the kid from punches, kicks, and a knife, but the editing is so rapid and jarring that, if there are actual gags occurring during it, they pass by in the same flash as the action.

Until a series of showdowns and shootouts in Vegas, the rest of the story becomes a road trip in which the family bonds, only to be occasionally interrupted by similarly cut action scenes. There's another fight in a college science lab and a car chase, which might have a good joke about the family sleeping while listening to some ethereal music. As obvious as it is, the joke might have worked, except that, again, Cellan Jones mainly cares about the quick cuts between gunshots and stunts.

There's not much to the concept of Dan trying to hide his skills from his family, even as those talents for violence need to be utilized to protect them. The story is too busy with Dan finding a new angle for romance with Jessica, convincing his college-bound daughter Nina (Zoe Margaret Colletti) that she's a good writer, and coming to terms with the fact that his son Kyle (Van Crosby) is very good at a particular video game. All of this means the filmmakers have to juggle multiple premises and tones, and maybe the movie's own tone is so bland because nobody knows what to do with that jumble of distinct conceits.

It also might simply be because all of those conceits are so inherently bland and formulaic, though. One might be more forgiving of such an action-comedy if either the action or the comedy worked, but on a fundamental level, The Family Plan fails both of those elements.

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