The Family Plan
Mark Wahlberg may have deserved a movie about spies mixed with everyday suburban life, like the classic “True Lies” or the slept on “Nobody,” in light of his solid comedic timing and action prowess. There’s something about an ordinary family man becoming a killing machine that taps into the part of our brain that wonders if we could save our loved ones when under attack, or if the weird guy down the street might actually have a secret past. It’s a neat little subgenre but “The Family Plan” is not.
Wahlberg is Dan Morgan, regular joe car dealer who loves his routines. Tacos on Wednesdays because Tuesday is predictable. He schedules sex with his wife Jessica (Michelle Monaghan) for Thursdays. He’s having some trouble with his two teenage kids. Nina (Zoe Colletti) wants to switch her plan from Stanford University to Southern Iowa University to follow a boy, Kyle (Van Crosby) hides that he still plays the shooter games dad banned him from. An inexplicable third kid is just old enough to make wacky baby faces and sounds while nonsense ensues around them. Over and over again.
That baby becomes key in the first big set piece, a fight in a grocery store where Dan must fend off an assassin while carrying them in one of those front-baby straps things. If this sounds ridiculous, you’re right! This moment should be absurd enough to clue you in that “The Family Plan” isn’t going anywhere interesting it’s relying on impossible situations for comedy instead of anything grounded or relatable. What makes this subgenre work so well is its ability to let everything unfold from such relatability, through both the action and comedy beats (“True Lies,” for example). But “The Family Plan” never establishes that crucial foundation in recognizable human behavior, it doesn’t even replace that lack of believability with laughs or thrills.
It turns out that Dan used to be a hired killer but only for the good guys! He worked for McCaffrey (Ciaran Hinds), so-called shadowy figure. When his cover is blown, he calls up an old acquaintance named Augie (Said Taghmaoui) and has him meet the Morgans in Vegas so they can all disappear. This naturally sets up a road trip from Buffalo to Las Vegas, wherein Dan can presumably tell Jessica everything and probably fix his problems with the teenagers along the way. It also allows for moments when adults sing “Ice, Ice Baby” together in the car instead of writing actual jokes or characters. And plenty more scenes of babies being quirky or funny because everybody involved knows they don’t have anything else going on character or story wise.
Avoidance of killers and the city they call home is only made possible by killing off everyone but the youngest Morgan. This is a dumb comedy, so I’m willing to suspend disbelief within reason but when Jessica asks Dan how he could leave his children alone in a hotel room, including the baby, while he dines out with her, it’s hard not to say “come on.” Obviously, they get separated and McCaffrey finds them, naturally, everyone learns everything.
I don’t doubt that Mark Wahlberg could have made something like this work. He has that wide eyed puppy dog thing going for him that allows him to toggle between action movie lead and conservative family man without missing a beat. Monaghan pulls off this kind of role in her sleep, she even manages to find some beats here that add depth to Jessica as a housewife who longs for her spontaneous youth. (Speaking of performers who deserve better than they often get Maggie Q does quite a bit with very little here as a new friend of Jessica’s whose ill intentions are immediately obvious.) And props should be given to Zoe Colletti, who brings charm and energy to what could easily be seen as a thankless daughter role.
No one on screen is responsible for the failure of “The Family Plan.” They all do fine work it’s just that they’re all working against a script that doesn’t give them enough real estate and a director who fails to blend an ordinary family drama with an unconventional action movie. The film ends on two notes that are shockingly violent for something otherwise so broad there are multiple gunshots fired in crowded places throughout Las Vegas over the last 10 minutes of “The Family Plan,” and at least one person dies from being stabbed with a dirty diaper which only underscores the fact that no one involved ever really knew what kind of movie this was supposed to be. So eventually they decided it wasn’t any of them.
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