Families can be the worst, especially around the holidays. Even if you love each member individually, when they’re collectively brought together it can be a recipe for disaster. However, trust me when I say you’d rather spend several drunken holidays with the most cartoonishly cringeworthy family imaginable than sit through the tiresome disaster that is “The Family Plan 2” — a film that smashes together action and holiday comedy clichés with such haphazard laziness that it feels less like a film than it does a simulacrum of one; an exhausted experience that overstays its welcome at every turn.
Starring Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan, this Apple TV sequel to the already-empty “The Family Plan” picks up shortly after its predecessor mercifully ended. Dan AKA Sean (Wahlberg), a former government operative who was previously keeping his past secret from his flatly one-dimensional family, is now known by all in the Morgan clan. This time around, he is the one being kept in the dark by his wife Jessica (Monaghan) about a big life secret of her own. With their older daughter Nina (Zoe Colletti) studying abroad, their older son Kyle (Van Crosby) struggling to keep an eye on his younger brother Max (Peter and Theodore Lindsey) and the holidays fast approaching, it’s remarkable they can even have date night.
When they then make a spontaneous trip to London to visit Nina after discovering that she can’t make it home for said holidays, they’ll get much more than they bargained for. Not only does their daughter have a boyfriend (cue the regressive jokes about overprotective dads that feel lifted from the unfunny and regressive comedies of yesteryear), but they’ll soon find themselves caught up in a new crisis. Only, instead of going to Vegas as they did in the first movie, they’ll now romp around Europe as they get pursued by a new baddie (Kit Harington) from Sean’s past that will stop at nothing to find them as they head out on the run. As for the audience, you’ll want to run as fast as you can away from this to a better movie.
To say this film is a retread of the original would be to undersell just how infinitely more boring everything is. While the first was not a comedy masterpiece by any means, there was at least something lightly humorous to the way Sean had to scramble to keep his secret from his family. It allowed for moments of scattered slapstick that, while not the most well-staged, at least felt like it was trying to do something fun with its premise. Though it didn’t succeed by any stretch of the imagination, at least it felt like there was a modicum of effort there.
No such saving grace can be found here. Though it tries to go through the same motions, with one character acknowledging how this is all just about the patriarch turning their world upside down again, the premise is without any genuinely earned chaos. It tries to squeeze some jokes out of the father’s former life, but the cat is already out of the bag. Even as all the comedy to be found within this setup had already run dry a full movie ago, “The Family Plan 2” keeps going back to the well in the desperate hope that there are still a few drops left. There isn’t, but that doesn’t stop the film from bafflingly trying all the same.
Instead, this sequel leans way into more awkward and derivative family holiday comedy jokes that all the familiar needle drops in the United Kingdom can’t instill with any bite. Whatever sporadic action there is has no weight behind it either, with a banal bus brawl between Wahlberg and Harington being the closest we get to anything remotely exciting. Though there are no fists of fury, there isn’t a lack of ham-fisted dialogue that constantly reminds you of what’s going on and the supposed emotional stakes that make this sequel different. It’s the type of writing that exists to remind those scrolling on their phones or doing laundry what is happening, though it lands with a thud if you’re actually focusing on it. Credit to Monaghan and Harington, who at least seem like they’re trying to give the clunky dialogue some more oomph, though Wahlberg delivers nearly every line with the same one-note befuddlement that has come to define far too much of his recent work.
By the time it drags through a contrived car chase (again set to another overused pop song that might as well be on a generic action movie playlist), “The Family Plan 2” never justifies why we took another trip. It tries to create a tense infiltration sequence and throws in a late betrayal that is foreshadowed with all the subtlety of a flashing neon sign. However, the biggest treachery comes from the film itself betraying your intelligence and your time. When it then attempts to call back to the first film with something approaching a bigger leap, the characters may land with their feet on the ground, but the experience itself has already come crashing down.
“The Family Plan 2” is available to stream on Apple TV starting Nov. 21.
