Critic Reviews

This is pretty routine material, but it’s been realized with charm and enthusiasm: The director, Simon Cellan Jones, maintains a good handle on the comic-thriller tone and shoots the action with wit and creativity.

The Family Plan exists in a world that defies all logic and reality. Granted, this is an over-the-top comedy, and yes, there are a few dark laughs, but this is basically a live-action cartoon with a deadly premise.

The Family Plan resembles the first Dan more than the second, too predictable and formulaic to excite, without the juice to become a family favorite.

Cheerfully dumb and dutifully formulaic, it’s “content” in the worst sense of the term.

The script works efficiently and everyone involved sells it hard; there are continuous closeup cutaways to that cute and gurgling baby who never cries no matter what happens. But the sheer robotic sheen of the film in the end works against it.

Stretching its high concept but thin results to the breaking point, The Family Plan feels like a movie whose best moments were during the pitch meeting.

A comic thriller that isn’t especially funny or particularly exciting, The Family Plan is an overlong slog that struggles to make use of its game cast.

No one on-screen is to blame for the failure of The Family Plan. They’re all fine, but they’re swimming upstream against a script that doesn’t give them enough to do and a director who fails at blending an average family and uncommon action into one vision.

There's a sweetness buried deep inside The Family Plan, but it gets completely smothered beneath all the jarring and poorly cut action and weird subplots that lead nowhere. Outside a few chuckles and a likable cast, there's nothing that makes it stand out.

Each setpiece is composed and paced much like the last, which only amplifies the sense of Dan as some kind of unflustered, largely unsympathetic man-machine, paused only by the script’s fleeting interpersonal conflicts.