The Family Plan 2

The Inertia of Comfort

There is a peculiar stillness at the heart of *The Family Plan 2*, a silence that persists even amidst the roar of engines and the crunch of bone. Director Simon Cellan Jones returns to the world of Dan Morgan (Mark Wahlberg)—the suburban dad with a lethal past—not to deepen the mythology of the assassin-turned-family-man, but to gentrify it. Released directly to Apple TV+, this sequel feels less like a film and more like a high-budget holiday card sent by people you don’t know very well: glossy, smiling, and fundamentally performative.



The narrative premise is a study in escalation without evolution. Having survived the road trip of the first film, the Morgan clan now descends upon Europe for Christmas, ostensibly to visit their daughter Nina (Zoe Colletti) in London. What follows is the genre's standard transmutation of tourism into battleground. However, Cellan Jones’s visual language here is oddly sterile. London and Paris are not treated as textured, living cities but as flat backdrops for kinetic events. The gray skies of London do not loom with atmosphere; they merely provide contrast for the inevitable explosions. When the action erupts—most notably a close-quarters brawl on the upper deck of a London bus—the choreography is competent but emotionally weightless. We are watching stunts, not struggle.

The film’s central conflict ostensibly revolves around the introduction of Finn Clarke (Kit Harington), Dan’s estranged half-brother and a specter from the family’s violent lineage. Harington, an actor capable of profound brooding intensity, is reduced here to a caricature of British villainy, sneering through scenes that required a Shakespearean sense of betrayal. The script, penned by David Coggeshall, attempts to weave a thread about the sins of the father, but it refuses to pull that thread tight enough to hurt. The tension between Dan and Finn should be the film’s pounding heart—a Cain and Abel story played out with silencers—but it plays instead like a petty domestic squabble escalated to international terrorism.



Where the film finds a flicker of humanity is, surprisingly, in its quieter moments of failure. There is a recurring gag involving a manual transmission car during a high-stakes chase that transcends its slapstick origins to comment on the generational gap in competence. Watching the son, Kyle (Van Crosby), struggle with the clutch while death closes in offers a rare moment of genuine vulnerability—a reminder that in a world of super-assassins, the scariest thing is often just being unskilled and unprepared.

Yet, these moments are fleeting. *The Family Plan 2* suffers from the modern blockbuster’s fear of friction. It smooths over the psychological trauma of a family constantly hunted by death, replacing it with banter that feels workshop-tested for mass appeal. The Morgans do not act like a family in crisis; they act like a family in a sitcom about a crisis.



Ultimately, *The Family Plan 2* is a monument to the safety of the algorithm. It is a film that demands nothing of its audience but their time, offering in return a series of moving images that are technically proficient and spiritually vacant. It is cinema as ambient noise—a gentle hum of violence designed not to shock, but to soothe us into a state of passive consumption. We are left watching a family fight for their lives, yet we never once fear they might lose them.