The Family Plan 2

The Algorithm Takes a Holiday

I’m still not convinced anybody was genuinely clamoring for a sequel to *The Family Plan*, but streaming-era math has never been especially interested in human desire. The 2023 movie was tailor-made folding-laundry entertainment—inoffensive, frictionless, engineered for a lazy Sunday—and it became one of Apple TV+'s biggest hits. So of course the machine asked for more. *The Family Plan 2* dutifully packs Mark Wahlberg’s suburban former assassin off to London and Paris at Christmas and serves up exactly the kind of sequel that premise promises, for better and mostly for worse.



Simon Cellan Jones is back directing, but the original movie’s one useful source of tension has vanished. Jessica (Michelle Monaghan), Nina (Zoe Colletti), and Kyle (Van Crosby) already know their bland car-salesman dad used to kill people for a living. Once that secret is gone, so is the game. Instead of suburban deception, the sequel drops the whole Morgan clan into international espionage when they fly to Europe to see Nina at college and an enemy from Dan’s past comes looking for him. The tone turns strange in a hurry. One minute the family is squabbling about college and screen time; the next they’re ducking bullets in a foreign city.

There’s a rooftop sequence halfway through that says everything about the film’s confused wavelength. Dan is in the middle of a hand-to-hand fight with a generic henchman against a postcard-pretty European skyline, while his family nearby keeps bickering about completely ordinary domestic nonsense. In theory, the crosscutting should be funny. In practice, the editing never finds the snap it needs, and the action has been sanded down so thoroughly it plays like an expensive insurance commercial. You keep waiting for a joke to land or a set piece to wake up. Mostly the movie just lets people explain the plot at each other.



If the film has a heartbeat at all, Kit Harington is supplying it. As Finn, a dangerous figure carrying a very personal grudge against Dan, he’s the one performer who seems aware that acting involves making choices. He carries himself like a spring pulled too tight, sneering as if the very sight of the Morgan family irritates him. After so many years of honorable brooding, it’s refreshing to watch him dip into outright villainy. Wahlberg, meanwhile, looks as if he’d rather be somewhere else. His shoulders droop, his line readings barely register, and he lumbers through the action with the bored patience of someone waiting for his number to be called at the DMV.

It’s hard not to watch the whole thing with a little cynicism. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com called it "an even-worse study in lazy filmmaking, aggressively unfunny clichés, and bland action sequences." That feels pretty fair. The movie moves with clockwork indifference from chase to forced family bonding to another chase, never once pretending it wants to be anything more than product.



Maybe that’s enough if all you need is a mildly noisy screen while the holiday weekend drifts by. Monaghan does what she can to smuggle in some warmth, and every so often the family rapport clicks into something briefly sweet. But most of *The Family Plan 2* starts evaporating before it’s even over. It’s built to play in the background while cousins argue in the kitchen—present enough to fill the room, never vivid enough to demand anyone’s attention.