Film Review: The Family Plan

Mark Wahlberg's latest movie, The Family Plan, was one of action, hilarity, romance and family, and I loved it so much that I thought I'd share my opinion on the film with you all.

Last week I wrote a blog post reviewing the movie Lift. The film starred Kevin Hart and was an action-comedy involving a mid-air heist. At the time, I thought this film was the best I'd watched all year.

However, things have now changed and Lift has been bumped down the order to second.

The reason is because last night I watched the film The Family Plan. My mum suggested it as a potential movie to watch for the whole family and we all loved it.

Throughout the entire film, we were smiling, laughing and really enjoying the action. Having now seen five movies in total this year, The Family Plan is definitely at the top and I'll tell you why.

Synopsis

The basic premise for The Family Plan is:

"A former top assassin living incognito as a suburban dad must take his unsuspecting family on the run when his past catches up to him."

Mark Wahlberg plays Dan Morgan, a car salesman. He drives a mini-van, is married to Michelle Monaghan's character, Jessica, and has three kids, Nina, Kyle and Max.

Dan may seem a bit predictable and a bit boring and to his kids, rather strict when it comes to social media and technology. Little do they know, it's for their safety.

But things go awry when a photo surfaces online of Dan and Jessica, resulting in his former colleagues hunting him down. What follows is lots of action, fights, comedic moments, and eventually the climax when his family find out.

Review

Now, let's get into my thoughts on The Family Plan.

First of all, it has a lot of famous faces with the likes of Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Monaghan, Maggie Q and Ciarán Hinds. As someone who loves action movies, Mark Wahlberg is an actor whose movies I enjoy. I loved him in Transformers and Deepwater Horizon, so I was pretty confident I'd like The Family Plan.

And I did. Immediately, we're introduced to Dan's character in his status-quo world as a car salesman. The first scenes we're shown are snippets of Buffalo and then Dan talking to a customer and trying to sell him a car. There is a voice-over before we actually see Dan that has two purposes: persuading the customer to buy the car and also giving the audience an insight into Dan's mind, revealing there's more to him than one would think.

The film's opening shows the family in their everyday lives and we get a good sense of who their characters are. I liked the development of the characters because you do get attached to them as a family and you hope that when they find out about Dan being an assassin, they're not too mad.

Throughout the entire film, there are lots of action sequences, which one would expect when the protagonist is a former assassin. But I thought they were well executed.

There's one scene in particular that involves Maggie Q and Michelle Monaghan, towards the end of the film, and I loved it. I've always wanted to learn self-defence and do some kickboxing and this film only made me want to learn more.

Credit: IMDB

Whilst The Family Plan is an action movie, there were lots of comedic moments throughout. Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan's characters provided a lot of hilarity throughout the film with their arguments and their banter, but it was really Max who stole the show.

Max is a toddler in the film and straightaway, before we even started the film and had just seen the preview photo on AppleTV+, I said that Max was so cute. And as the film progressed, he became even cuter.

During The Family Plan, there were moments when Max was the only Morgan child to be aware that his dad was actually an assassin, which resulted in a lot of laughs. I think Max's character added a lot to the film and if he wasn't in it, then in my opinion, The Family Plan would be less entertaining.

However, with the family of five on the run, travelling from Buffalo to Vegas, The Family Plan is certainly a worthwhile action movie. Personally, I will rewatch The Family Plan this year because I love it so much.

And it may seem early for me to say it's one of my favourite movies this year given that we're only 21 days into 2024, but I'm confident that The Family Plan has every aspect of a movie that I love.

So if you have access to AppleTV+ and you enjoy action comedies, then give The Family Plan a watch. If you do watch it, let me know in the comments what you think.

Until next time...