‘The Family Plan’ Review: Rote Actioner Stars Mark Wahlberg as Cinema’s Least Well-Disguised Assassin
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Would it have killed him to quit sit-ups for a few months? Maybe load up on some Häagen-Dazs? Famously, Mark Wahlberg wakes in the wee hours for a 3:30 a.m.
workout — perhaps he could have treated himself to a five o’clock lie-in? Whatever the case, the star has made no concessions to dadbod reality in “The Family Plan.” Playing milquetoast car salesman Dan, a married father of three whom nobody knows used to be a high-level government assassin, he strips off early in proceedings — on a night of abortive anniversary lovemaking with his weary wife — to reveal a torso as jacked as the day is long.
Yet those enviable xylophone abs run counter to the slim comic premise of Simon Cellan Jones‘s formulaic shoot-’em-up: He’s a stone-cold killer, but everyone around him sees only a schlub.
That’s the exact word thrown at Dan by his wife Jessica (Michelle Monaghan), and their two sullen teenagers Nina (Zoe Colletti) and Kyle (Van Crosby), all of whom regard his dull job, cornball personality and comfy homebody routine with some degree of affectionate contempt. (Only their third child, perma-smiling infant Max, ever looks at him with something approaching wonder.) Wahlberg, however, doesn’t present as schlubby, bodily or otherwise: Even in the film’s early scenes, he carries himself with a bluffly macho always-preparedness.
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