'The Family Plan 2' Is Almost Passable

Apple TV’s The Family Plan 2 is cut from the same cloth as the generic, algorithm-friendly first installment. If there’s one thing the sequel has over the original, it’s that there’s far less to set up than the family version of True Lies, where the Morgans — wife Jessica (Michelle Monaghan), daughter Nina (Zoe Colletti), older son Kyle (Van Crosby), and younger son Max (Peter Lindsey) — discover that Dad, Dan (Mark Wahlberg), is a former hitman.

That revelation is already baked in this time, so things move more quickly. It’s the holidays, and the family decides to spend it in London, where Nina and her boyfriend, Omar (Reda Elazouar), are attending college. Dan now runs a security firm, and he picks up a quick gig assessing vulnerabilities in a bank vault so he can write off the entire family vacation. Unfortunately, the “client” turns out to be his half-brother, Finn Clarke (Kit Harington), son of the father Dan dispatched in the original. Finn’s mother was the family housekeeper; he’s held a lifelong grudge, and the job is a setup: Dan is tricked into stealing a key from a safe-deposit box that grants Finn access to the family inheritance, which Finn intends to misuse for fairly obvious villainy.

Finn also arranges things so the Morgans are framed for robbing the bank, then puts a bounty on Dan’s head. The police and a parade of redshirt assassins are suddenly after them, and off we go. Once the 20-minute setup is out of the way, the movie does little more than drop the marble and let the mousetrap snap into place. Director Simon Cellan Jones keeps the action brisk and efficient, if mostly bland. There are wisecracks — mostly from Dan, mostly at Nina’s hot new boyfriend’s expense — plus parkour, a car chase, a lot of running, and even more punching.

It’s all a well-oiled, barely PG-13 wind-up toy that zips along the Thames atop a double-decker bus and hops across rooftops in Paris. The movie goes and goes, rarely slowing down long enough for anyone to acknowledge how dumb it all is. But that’s the point. It’s not meant to be savored so much as consumed, preferably with the whole family between episodes of Ted Lasso or The Last Frontier.

I’ll give it this: Michelle Monaghan and Mark Wahlberg have surprisingly solid chemistry; the kids get more to do this round; and The Family Plan 2 never gets bogged down in pesky things like plot or character development. It’s zippy, nicely shot, and instantly forgettable — which is to say, it does its job.