The Family Plan 2 2025 Movie Review
Poor Michelle Monaghan. Just when it seemed like she had found true love, it turned out that her fiancé was a not-so-retired IMF super spy who was existentially incapable of leaving his old life behind. And when that relationship didn’t work out (something to do with the demands of saving the world and everyone in it), she rebounded by starting a life with a Buffalo used car salesman who — shortly after the birth of their third child together — was forced to reveal that he’s an ex-assassin whose old life refuses to let him go. Some girls just can’t catch a break.
The good news is that new husband Dan Morgan, unlike Ethan Hunt, is willing to fight for the relationship even if it puts his family in harm’s way. The bad news is that Dan Morgan, unlike Ethan Hunt, is Dan Morgan, and unlike Ethan Hunt. He’s passive instead of supernaturally locked-in. He’s liable to come off as a charmless byproduct of AI instead of its mortal enemy. He’s Mark Wahlberg instead of Tom Cruise. And the soft-hearted action series that Apple has built around him — too violent for kids, too childish for adults — feels like a Costco-brand imitation of a Hollywood franchise instead of a property that was manufactured with any creative spark of its own.
No wonder it seems like Apple has bought these movies in bulk. Arriving less than two years after the original, “The Family Plan 2” doubles down on the vibe of its predecessor, which — for those for those of you who don’t remember the seismic moment in American culture when Dan Morgan first entered into our lives — might be described as “‘Mission: Impossible’ if it were designed to be watched exclusively on the back of a car seat headrest.”
It’s hard to fathom why Skydance Media continues to partner with Apple and Netflix when they could just cut out the middleman and release masterpieces like “Ghosted,” “Fountain of Youth,” and “The Old Guard 2” directly to the built-in entertainment system that comes with every new Honda Odyssey, but I suppose that CEO David Ellison — the nepo baby final boss who’s been devouring the film industry with all of the love and affection that Galactus consumes a planet — must know what he’s doing.
Of course, I’m fully aware that “The Family Plan 2” wasn’t made for the critics. Not because it’s bad (which it is), but rather because it was only intended to be watched by people who don’t care if it’s good. This movie often feels like it was made by them too, which should be comforting to anyone who considers themselves a fan of the franchise. Continuity is the name of the game here, as OG director Simon Cellan Jones has reteamed with series mastermind David Coggeshall for another exciting round of first-draft fun, and they’ve brought all of your favorite characters along with them: Dan, his wife Jessica, and their three kids who presumably also have names.
Like their mother, a former decathlete, the children all have exactly one trait. The youngest one is young. The middle kid is good with computers. And the eldest is a girl who goes to college in London. That last detail is important, because — just a few minutes into the film — it motivates the Morgans to fly across the pond for a little Christmas work trip. But it’s not all love, actually, as it turns out that Dan’s client, Aidan (Kit Harrington, seemingly on lunch breaks from shooting his great performance in season three of “Industry”), isn’t a bank owner who’s paying Dan to safety-test his new vault, he’s a bank robber who’s paying Dan to steal a big key from it. Also, he’s Dan’s long-lost brother.
Now that’s what I call a family plan!
You see, Dan and Aidan’s supervillain father has died in prison between movies (a mercy killing for Ciarán Hinds, who only appears here in a still photo), and that means his criminal empire is up for grabs to anyone who has the key to unlock his network or something. Aidan frames Dan for the theft, because estranged siblings are complicated, and so our heroes are forced to prove their innocence by foiling Aidan’s bid for power.
Truth be told, there’s no meaningful reason to root for the Morgans in this scenario — not only would it be funny to see these people have to explain the plot of this movie to Interpol, but defeating Aidan would result in the waste of a perfectly good criminal network, complete with fancy computers, a big house in Paris, and a small handful of generic henchmen whom “The Family Plan 2” makes a historically half-assed attempt to establish as individual characters. The action scenes that follow the Morgans from England to France do precious little to sell us the charm of Dan’s brood, which proves fatal to a film that hinges — or should — on the idea that his wife and kids can now fight alongside him.
The setpieces are sloppy and unexciting to the extreme, and most of them, like a low-energy fight aboard a double-decker bus, are shapeless to the point that they simply end instead of building to a climactic beat (to say nothing of the goon who spontaneously falls dead on a rooftop during the third act). At one point, Wahlberg literally falls asleep in the middle of a car chase; the beat is credible enough on its own to forget that his character has been drugged.
Other than that, the scenery is the most believable part of the movie, as all that Apple money has either paid for some of the most elite production access you’ll find in a modern action movie, or for the digital wizardry required to fake it so real. The dynamics between the Morgans aren’t quite so convincing, as at no point does it seem like these people have ever met each other before, let alone that they’re related by blood.
The closest thing we get to a real human connection sparks from the relationship between Dan and his daughter’s new boyfriend Omar (Reda Elazouar), who gets swept along for the ride and can be found loitering in the background during most scenes; maybe it’s just because Wahlberg delivers every line to every character in every movie as if he were trying to big time his teenager daughter’s new boyfriend, but these two have an errant chemistry that “The Family Plan 2” is able to make good on to legitimately humorous effect before the end. Sidse Babett Knudsen’s cameo as a drunken Russian spy is also kind of fun in an “we’re all trying to make the best of this” sort of way, but this movie is not worth your time and I’m tired of writing about it.
