“The Household Plan” has a well-known premise: A seemingly bizarre household man with a clandestine id is hiding a violent previous. It’s been finished as farce, in “True Lies,” and as drama, in “A Historical past of Violence,” in each cases to rousing impact. “Household Plan,” starring Mark Wahlberg because the dissembling patriarch, performs it for laughs, utilizing his deception and its unraveling as a springboard for screwball comedy.
It takes the type of an motion picaresque, when Wahlberg’s Dan, a former hit man utilizing an alias, whisks his unwitting household on a cross-country highway journey, attempting to evade the approaching assassins who’ve uncovered his suburban ruse. Dan, his spouse (Michelle Monaghan), their bickering youngsters (Zoe Colletti and Van Crosby) and their 10-month-old child cruise from Buffalo to Vegas of their minivan, flailing by way of high-speed getaways and shootouts alongside the best way.
That is fairly routine materials, but it surely’s been realized with allure and enthusiasm: The director, Simon Cellan Jones, maintains a very good deal with on the comic-thriller tone and shoots the motion with wit and creativity, discovering intelligent methods to combine the diapers and BabyBjörns of fatherhood into the brisk, “John Wick”-style battle scenes. (Highlights embody a whisper-quiet automobile chase set to Enya’s “Solely Time” and a few grocery retailer kung fu involving an toddler.)
Wahlberg is extra charismatic than he’s been onscreen in almost a decade, and his chemistry with Monaghan is the muse of a believable marriage — they hold the home facet grounded, even because the murderer stuff will get a contact ludicrous. The nice Ciaran Hinds is the villain, showing to take pleasure in himself as a lot as everyone else. He, too, understood the task: Have enjoyable.
The Household PlanRated PG-13. Operating time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+.
