The Family Plan 2 Review: Mark Wahlberg's Apple+ Sequel Is Mind-Numbingly Boring and Unfunny.

The Family Plan at least had stakes you could get behind. In the first of the Apple + straight-to-streaming family action comedies, Dan (Mark Wahlberg) is hiding his previous identity as a high-level assassin. The big secret of The Family Plan 2is that Jessica (Michelle Monaghan) has a job offer in another state. The first film was almost universally panned by critics, but because it was such a massive hit for Apple + we now get spoon fed a sequel whose only improvement is the beauty of the Parisian cityscape, a production trip funded entirely by the success of the iPhone. Simon Cellan Jones’ follow-up to the 2023 film is so dire and comically flat that it induces existential dread. It is an experience akin to watching a two-hour credit card commercial.

The Family Plan 2 is a Staid, Humorless Affair

After the events of The Family Plan, Dan, aka Sean McCaffery, has switched careers from used car sales to high-tech security consulting. The family seems to be living in moderate peace and quiet, with their biggest stress coming in the form of eldest daughter Nina (Zoe Colletti) refusing to fly home for Christmas during her semester abroad, in England. With the extreme overbearance of her father, its hard to blame her. Wahlberg’s off-screen, cultivated persona as a Good Christian Family Man is exceedingly apparent in this series, in which the beefy actor uses nearly every line of dialogue to yell in anxiety about how much he cares for his children. Yes, thank you, we understand. It’s exhausting.

David Coggeshall is back to write the sequel script, and the first act is nothing if not unnecessarily complicated, tying itself into knots trying to justify a family vacation to visit their daughter. It’s difficult to say why they can’t simply go, but whatever the case, Dan finds the perfect excuse in a business proposition from a bank in London that happens to contact his firm at the same time he frets about not being together as a whole family. This is a man we are told ad nauseam is a super spy, yet he also cannot smell a plot from a million miles away. Maybe the suburbs of Buffalo has made him soft.

Once in England, the family meets Nina’s utterly jacked boyfriend, Omar (Reda Elazouar), who is perfectly sweet and lovely, and whom Dan immediately distrusts for no apparent reason. Without any other explanation, it seems fair to assume Dan is just racist, or else Coggeshall and Jones are, since Omar is only one of two persons of color in the entire film and the butt of every joke. The other person of color, Vikram (Sanjeev Bhaskar) is a mostly mute butler. The other person in the film with an accent, a Russian spy and former girlfriend of Dan’s, draws “humor” from eccentrically singing about borscht. The humor is never more elevated than Monaghan drooling at her daughter’s boyfriend’s six-pack.

While Dan goes off to the bank to have a business meeting one night, Jessica privately practices her “I have a job offer in Ohio” speech like she’s getting ready to cop to an affair. At the bank, Dan meets Aidan (Kit Harrington), the branch manager, who tasks Dan with testing his security system by breaking into the vault. Dan does so immediately, only for Aidan to — surprise! — turn out not to be the bank manager, but a criminal who is just using Dan’s expertise. Dan reveals that he could tell Aidan was a fraud the second he met him, which, of course, begs the question of why he went along with helping a stranger rob a bank, but regardless, the family man now has the exceptional problem of being internationally wanted for robbery.

It turns out that Aidan is actually Dan’s long-lost brother that their father (Ciarán Hinds) had kicked to the curb at a young age, and is now out for revenge. And Dan’s plan to foil his brother’s villainy is to entice him with family. As in, he actually sits Aidan down and tells him that if he stops doing bad stuff they can all be a family. That’s the plan.

Suffice it to say that no one is acting normally in this film, and that, even though they are running from death and the law at any given moment, moving across borders with fake IDs and stolen money, there isn’t a single second of legitimate urgency. In between escapes, there is obnoxiously repetitious dialogue about the importance of “sticking together” and how family is the “most important thing.” Nina does call out her father for twice now subjecting his kids to certain death, upending their entire lives, and gaslighting them into believing he’s just an innocent, dopey dude, but after a scene of shaming they all kind of just shrug their shoulders and move on.

The film is woeful from top to bottom. There are so many moments that feel like stragglers of a first draft, including a band of five assassins that Aidan hires to take out Dan, and whom are never seen nor heard from again. Except for the one female assassin, who gets to fight Jessica, because, of course, because women can only fight women, or something. Even Kevin Matley’s score is absurdly generic, which sounds like it was made in a vacuum irrespective of the film’s action. At two hours long, the film feels closer to ten. If there is a third Family Plan, hopefully they actually have a plan besides pumping something out so non-distinctive.

The Family Plan 2 streams on Apple + on November 21st.