TL;DR: The Family Plan 2 is a mild improvement over the original but still stuck in the same generic streaming-sequel rut. Wahlberg and Monaghan have better chemistry, Kit Harington gives the sequel some bite, and the Christmas vibes work—for a while. But the action is toothless, the jokes are recycled, and the movie ultimately plays like a holiday sitcom episode stretched to feature length. Fine for casual holiday viewing; forgettable by New Year’s.
The Family Plan 2
I’ll be honest: when Apple dropped the first The Family Plan back in 2023, I watched it the same way I watch a YouTube video explaining Elden Ring lore at 2 a.m.—half curious, half bored, fully aware that none of it would survive the morning. It was a thoroughly forgettable Mark Wahlberg action-comedy, engineered in the same algorithmic lab where streaming services apparently grow their Generic Dad Movies. And yet, like every other streamer-optimized chunk of dad-friendly chaos, it performed absurdly well. So here we are, two years later, staring down The Family Plan 2: the holiday-flavored sequel no one asked for and yet somehow always knew was coming.
The odd thing is, this franchise keeps stumbling into success like a Roomba that occasionally bumps into a gold bar. Apple saw a hit; Wahlberg saw a paycheck; the algorithm saw enough streams to justify slapping tinsel on the same plot structure and calling it new. That’s not inherently a crime. I’ve fallen for many sequels built solely on Christmas lights and the promise of lukewarm comfort—but with The Family Plan 2, I kept wishing the filmmakers had pushed even a little harder to evolve beyond recycling the same mid-jokes, the same dad-antics, and the same pseudo-espionage shenanigans.
Picking up two years after the first movie, this sequel wastes no time reminding us that Dan Morgan is still the world’s most aggressively normal dad who just so happens to be a former mercenary. His wife Jessica and the kids know everything now, which should be fertile ground for comedy. Instead, it mostly results in the family giving Dan supportive glances and delivering dialogue that sounds like a GPS reading off exposition. And then comes the plot propulsion: Dan’s criminal-overlord father dies in prison, his daughter Nina decides she’s skipping Christmas for college life in London, and suddenly the man is spiraling harder than me trying to organize cables behind my TV.
So Dan takes a business trip to the UK under the guise of checking in on a security client, but really, it’s because he can’t emotionally process a Christmas without all his kids under one roof. I get it. Holiday rituals are a big deal. My family still reenacts the same chaotic Christmas Eve traditions we’ve been doing since Windows XP existed. But the movie paints Dan’s obsession with preserving Christmas like he’s the final boss of a seasonal RPG. He is unwilling to budge, unwilling to evolve, and that rigidity sets the stage for the story’s most interesting idea: a man trying so hard to freeze time that he forgets his kids are leveling up.
Once the Morgans land in London, the movie tries to inject tension by introducing Nina’s new boyfriend Omar, a relentlessly cheerful guy who calls Dan “daddy” like he’s auditioning for TikTok cringe compilations. Wahlberg plays the discomfort well—I’ll give him that. But the jokes lean so heavily on generational cringe that it feels like watching your uncle use slang he read in a meme three weeks too late. It’s comedy by way of parental eye-roll templates, and if you’ve seen one version of the “embarrassing dad ruins everything” dynamic, congratulations—you’ve basically seen this entire movie.
Then comes the real antagonist: Kit Harington, showing up as Dan’s long-lost half-brother Aidan, a man fueled by jealousy, abandonment, and the kind of emotional baggage normally reserved for late-game JRPG villains. And surprisingly, Harington is… good? There’s something there. Aidan isn’t a cartoonish moustache-twirler; he’s genuinely wounded, genuinely furious that Dan got the life he never did. It’s textbook cliché, yes, but it’s the kind of cliché that still works if you commit to it with enough brooding intensity—and Harington has spent a solid decade perfecting that skill set.
Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t know what to do with him. The Family Plan 2 teases emotional complexity the way my ISP teases “gigabit speeds”—lots of promises, not much delivery. Instead, Aidan mostly pops up in predictable bursts of villain energy, chasing Dan across London landmarks while spouting lore dumps that feel like DLC for a game nobody plays anymore.
The action itself is where the movie starts to unravel. The first film wasn’t exactly John Wick, but it had bursts of unexpected violence that were weirdly bold for a family-comedy framework. The sequel, though, is shockingly tame. You can feel the studio notes all over the choreography: fewer punches, fewer broken bones, more wide shots, less impact. The worst offender is a showdown between Wahlberg and Harington on a double-decker bus—a sequence that should be punching above its weight but instead feels like watching NPCs fight in an open-world game thirty meters away. The camera just sits there, observing from a safe distance, as if afraid to get involved.
Despite that, there is one element that almost saves this movie: the Christmas vibes. I’m annoyingly picky about holiday movies—I need the right mix of sincerity and chaos—but The Family Plan 2 nails the early-act atmosphere. The decorations feel lived-in. The family traditions feel earnest. There’s something oddly comforting about watching Wahlberg desperately try to keep the holiday magic alive, even if his emotional arc doesn’t quite land. The movie even gets a fundamental Christmas detail right: you put up the tree after Thanksgiving, not on Christmas Day like half the holiday movies seem to think. Points for accuracy.
But the longer the movie goes on, the more the holiday charm fades, replaced by a sitcom-like haze of recycled jokes, generic action, and safe storytelling. It’s not offensively bad; it’s just aggressively fine. And that’s probably the best way to summarize The Family Plan 2: a mildly upgraded version of a movie that was already pretty disposable. It’s the cinematic equivalent of background noise while you’re untangling lights and pretending not to panic about how many ornaments your toddler is eating.
I found myself wishing the movie leaned harder into its own absurdity. When it allows Wahlberg and Monaghan to actually have fun as a couple, the movie sparks to life. Their chemistry feels warmer, more confident, and genuinely charming compared to the first film. Monaghan gets more to do this time, and she absolutely should’ve been given even more. Every time the two play off each other—whether through improvised-feeling bits or silly spy-adjacent gags—the movie feels almost human.
But then it remembers it’s supposed to be a family-action-comedy sequel written by committee, and it scurries back to the safety of easy jokes and mild peril.
By the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t angry or disappointed—I was simply ready to move on. The Family Plan 2 exists. It fills its runtime. It delivers a handful of chuckles, a sprinkling of Christmas spirit, and a villain who deserved a much better movie. If your only criteria is “something festive to watch while you decorate the tree,” this will do. If you’re hoping for upgrade levels of improvement, you’re not getting Cyberpunk-2.0 energy here. This is more like an average patch that fixes three bugs and introduces two new ones.
And yet… I didn’t hate it. Maybe that’s the holiday magic working overtime. Or maybe I’ve just come to accept that the subgenre of Streamable Dad Action Comedies is now a permanent fixture of the cinematic landscape. The Family Plan 2 is more of the same—but a little better, a little warmer, and a little more aware of what it wants to be, even if what it wants to be is just background noise wrapped in Christmas lights.
