‘The Family Plan’: Mark Wahlberg Makes for a Disastrous Secret Assassin
Boasting a groan-worthy premise that it then executes cheesily, The Family Plan is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s True Lies by way of Martin Lawrence’s College Road Trip, albeit with none of the former’s thrilling spectacle and way too much of the latter’s cornball humor. Premiering on Apple TV+ on Dec. 15, Simon Cellan Jones’ action-comedy stars Mark Wahlberg as a suburban husband and dad whose secret past as a government assassin comes back to haunt him, thus endangering his comfortable domestic bliss. Cheerfully dumb and dutifully formulaic, it’s “content” in the worst sense of the term.
In a cookie-cutter Buffalo planned community, Dan Morgan (Wahlberg) resides with his physical therapist wife Jessica (Michelle Monaghan), high school senior daughter Nina (Zoe Colletti), gamer teen son Kyle (Van Crosby), and baby boy Max (Iliana Norris), whose coos and laughter are used as incessantly “amusing” punctuation. Dan is a great car salesman who convinces a customer to splurge on a Camaro by stating, "There comes a time in every man's life when he asks himself, am I living the life I should be, or am I capable of something greater?... It’s never too late to become the man that you’ve always wanted to be.” This is inspirational mush that’s transparently about Dan’s own situation and on-the-horizon predicament since his prior career as a military-grade killer is directly at odds with the aggressively “normal” existence he’s carved out for himself.
Dan is grappling with a variety of issues at home, all of them tailor-made to be corrected by his ensuing adventure. Jessica likes spending every wedding anniversary at the amusement park where they first fell in love but she nonetheless craves more travel and spontaneity, what with them enjoying tacos every Wednesday and sex every Thursday. Nina has transformed from an outspoken and crusading newspaper reporter into a brat who spouts social justice buzzwords learned from her college boyfriend, whom she wants to follow to school in Iowa, much to Jessica’s displeasure. Kyle, meanwhile, is an antisocial kid who, in defiance of his dad’s orders, plays video games under the alias Kyllboi, and has become an online sensation for his skills. And Max, well, he coos a lot!