Even though the first The Family Plan came out only two years ago, you’ll be happy to know I remember next to nothing about it. But as its unnecessary sequel, The Family Plan 2, began to unfurl, I started to pick up flashes of what had happened to the Morgan family in Las Vegas all those many months before.
In case you don't remember, it turned out Dan Morgan’s (Mark Wahlberg) father wasn’t an especially nice guy; in fact, he was a gangster of the more violent ilk and he used Dan to carry out some pretty terrible crimes as part of his enterprise. But Dan turned over a new leaf and tried to leave his criminal past and his father behind. Now in The Family Plan 2, dad is dead and Dan is living the perfect suburban life with his wife Jessica (Michelle Monaghan) and two sons, the older Kyle (Van Crosby) and younger Max (twins Peter and Theodore Lindsey); the Morgans also have an older daughter, Nina (Zoe Colletti), off at a London college. She has just told them she won’t be flying home for Christmas, so Dan decides he’ll surprise her by bringing the family to London. Yes, this film qualifies as a Christmas movie, in addition to being an action-comedy-family film.
One issue the Morgans seem to have is communication. For example, Jessica is nervous about telling Dan she’s just been offered a coaching job at Ohio State because she knows her husband is in love with their current home in Buffalo (for the record, it’s a five-hour drive between Buffalo and Columbus, Ohio—it’s hardly a cross-country move). And daughter Nina neglects to mention she has a serious boyfriend, Omar (Reda Elazouar), which is the real reason she doesn’t want to leave the country for the holidays. Even Dan has ulterior motives for wanting to go to London that involve a prospective new client for his security business; but when he arrives at the bank in question, he’s met by bank manager Finn Clarke (Kit Harrington), who turns out not to be a bank manager at all but his long-lost half-brother (dad slept with the housekeeper, as apparently is the tradition in England). Soon, he has Dan breaking into the bank to steal a computer key that opens up the secrets of their father’s criminal empire. But Dan manages to get away from Finn and pocket the key in the process, leading to a movie-long cat-and-mouse game during the most festive time of the year in London.
I was never quite sure why Finn wanted to kill Dan or in a way blames him for the way their father treated him—Dan didn’t even know Finn existed until this trip, and he seems more than willing to play the good brother and get to know this vengeful prick. But Finn has other plans that involve using all of the organization’s assassins to track down and kill Dan and his adorable family. Meanwhile, because the Morgans are such a close family and Dan is way overprotective, they bicker constantly in ways that make no sense, considering how deadly their newfound uncle is. There are are a few car chases, some rooftop parkour that’s pretty cool, and some pseudo-spy stuff that feels way too sophisticated for a down and dirty film like this.
Working from a thin script by David Coggeshall, returning director Simon Cellan Jones (who also directed Wahlberg in the dog movie Arthur the King in between The Family Plan movies) deals with the shifting dynamics of a family whose children are becoming adults with the subtlety of a wooden mallet to the cranium. The jokes don’t work, most of the action is familiar, and while some of the holiday views of London are quite pretty, we’ve seen these images in a dozen better Christmas movies over the years. The film’s groaner of an epilogue is perhaps what killed any goodwill I might have felt toward this movie, with a one-year-later update that seems implausible and completely pointless. By the time this film was done, I was already wondering if I’d forget everything about it faster than I did the first film. I’m about 65 percent of the way there already.
The film is now streaming on Apple TV.
