Derivative Comedy Is Technically a Movie

After finishing up The Family Plan—a new action-comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan—I was pointed in the direction of this hilarious tweet from 2021 posted by the writer of the film, David Coggeshell, where he admits that his own agents dropped him when he sent them the initial spec script. A badge of pride is the moment of this tweet, however, as the script had managed to appear on that year’s Black List, an annual survey which lists Hollywood’s most-liked, unproduced screenplays, a list that can make or break a career. The Black List’s hit ratio varies wildly, but it’s still interesting to consider what went on here during the jump from page to screen. Was the script for The Family Plan vastly different between then and its finished product in 2023, or did it simply read better, and easier, typed up on a blank sheet? Was it somehow more ingenious in its chrysalis form? Or did Coggeshell’s team know from the start that what they had on their hands was a stinker of the highest order? It’s difficult to see how anyone thought other than the latter.

Helmed by Simon Cellan Jones (Jessica Jones, Generation Kill), The Family Plan is just one of hundreds of the same movie, revived and repackaged but offering nothing new to justify its existence. We’ve seen it all before: A wholesome family man has a secret violent past and, suddenly, his former life collides with his new one in hilarious and/or terrifying ways. Just three years ago, we got that exact premise in the Bob Odenkirk-starring Nobody, not breaking new ground but succeeding as a likable romp with great action, starring an actor who’s deliriously hard to dislike. Conversely, The Family Plan is unlikeable, has poor action sequences and stars Mark Wahlberg, an actor who takes himself far too seriously to lead a comedy as anything but the straight man half of a double act (see his successes in The Other Guys, Ted and Daddy’s Home). Wahlberg plays Dan Morgan, a former covert assassin who left his life of murdering evildoers with his hot assassin girlfriend for a suburban family with the sweet, down-to-earth Jessica (Monaghan). But Jessica, a former decathlete turned physical therapist, never necessarily wanted to settle down either—now she feels trapped in Buffalo with her family.

The couple has three children: Gaming-addicted Kyle (Van Crosby), boy-crazy Nina (Zoe Colletti) and infant Max. Naturally, other than Max and in addition to Dan, the family members are all hiding something about themselves from one another: Kyle’s successes as a popular streamer; Nina’s abandonment of her editing role at the school paper; Jessica’s desire for a bigger, more exciting life. And so on and so forth. When Dan’s former coworkers, led by the vengeful leader McCaffrey (Ciarán Hinds), finally track him down, Dan has to get his family to safety so that he can change their identities and go back into hiding. Together, they take a 33-hour road trip from Buffalo to Las Vegas under the guise of Dan wanting to surprise his family with a fun, much-needed vacation. They get into various hijinks and shenanigans along the way, as Dan struggles to conceal the true nature of the trip so that he can eventually come clean to his family the right way. In the end, they all have to learn things about “being themselves” and “the importance of family.” You know, the things that characters tend to learn in movies like this, because what else would they learn?

The Family Plan is, at best, a skeleton of a real movie entirely reliant on clichés, stock characters (the “woke daughter” is one of my personal favorites) and allusions to better films, down to using that one baby giggling sound effect—you all know what I’m talking about. I can’t decide the amount to which I can even fault the director, because every element exudes a certain empty, for-hire directorial implementation that accompanies most Marvel films. Perhaps Jones was put into the director’s chair, but there’s no proof that a human being directed this. The action, of which there is a-plenty, is dull and tedious. The comedy is comedically non-existent; a gag involving a suspicious man, whom Dan mistakes for one of the assassins because of his accent and who turns out to just be a regular German guy, is almost funny. But you get the strange feeling that the gag was already done somewhere better before, and you’re just riding the high of that memory. Aside from that, I can’t recall a single joke that doesn’t amount to a situation or comment that we’re just supposed to find implicitly funny because of the connotations—like giving an old woman a massage or fighting bad guys with a baby strapped to your chest (a horrifically tense sequence that leaves one questioning the efficacy of shaken baby syndrome in this universe).

It’s such a derivative phone-in job that one wonders if The Family Plan is some sort of money-laundering scheme for everyone involved—the kind of cliché assumption one makes about a bad movie that, in this case, manages to fit the movie itself. There is absolutely nothing interesting or original; it makes no sense that the script made the Black List, someone read it and then thought it would be a good idea to turn it into a movie that provides anyone with anything in terms of emotional satisfaction or narrative gratification. Maybe it does make sense from the cynical perspective that it’s such an easy, familiar, accessible sell. But even then, I think that idea condescends to an audience who will likely want something even a little bit more. 

Even the music is uninspired, either anonymous Forever 21 soundtrack or one-hit wonders. There is nothing in The Family Plan that you haven’t seen before, to the point that there’s somehow even less. A speech made by Woke Daughter at the end, in which she literally says to the villain “family is the most important thing in the entire world,” and which ends up functioning as an obvious diversion in context, tries to lampshade this awful script—the screenwriter attempting to absolve himself by metatextually forcing one of his characters to acknowledge the hack job of his own creation. Because it’s not so bad if the creators wink-wink at its own badness, right? Actually, it makes it all that much worse. They know better, and could do better, but they’re not, and they’re dragging us down with them.

Director: Simon Cellan Jones
Writer: David Coggeshall
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Monaghan, Zoe Colletti, Van Crosby, Saïd Taghmaoui, Maggie Q, Ciarán Hinds
Release Date: December 15, 2023 (Apple TV+)

Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.

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