Seemingly every time he gets in front of a recording device lately, actor Mark Wahlberg has been touting his plans to make Las Vegas into Hollywood 2.0. Wahlberg, who moved to Vegas with his family in late 2022, is the movie-star version of a familiar Vegas type: the rich out-of-towner who arrives with big plans and immediately starts exerting his influence — or at least attempts to.
Thus far, Wahlberg’s grand ambitions to transform Las Vegas into a subsidiary of Hollywood have not panned out. As a star and producer, though, he’s been steering some of his own projects toward Vegas, and the first result is the action-comedy The Family Plan, now streaming on Apple TV+. Watching this piece of disposable, prefab entertainment gives a sense of what kind of filmmaking Wahlberg wants to bring to town.
The Family Plan isn’t even particularly good disposable, prefab entertainment, and it’s only slightly more entertaining than another one-time, would-be bellwether of high-profile Vegas film production, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. The movie begins in Buffalo, New York, where Wahlberg plays seemingly ordinary suburban dad Dan Morgan, who sells used cars and leads a humdrum life with his wife Jessica (Michelle Monaghan) and three kids.
Dan is curiously adamant about staying off social media and never having his picture taken, and when he’s attacked at the grocery store, he unleashes some fierce fighting skills that he clearly didn’t learn at the car dealership. It turns out Dan is a former covert assassin who’s been hiding from the dangerous team he wasn’t given permission to leave. Now that he’s been found out, he must go on the run, but since Jessica and the kids are clueless about his past, he tells them that they’re headed on an impromptu road trip to Las Vegas.
“I know it’s not Europe, but there’s a Venice and an Eiffel Tower,” Dan says, trying to convince Jessica that Las Vegas is the perfect destination for their long-awaited vacation. The movie’s view of the city never goes beyond that superficial first impression, and Wahlberg, director Simon Cellan Jones, and screenwriter David Coggeshall don’t have any interest in truly exploring it. Despite Wahlberg’s big talk about bringing film production to town, most of the movie was shot in the Atlanta area, standing in for both Buffalo and Vegas. The climax takes place at the fictional, abandoned Poseidon hotel-casino, with some of its exteriors shot at the Strat, and interiors courtesy of an Atlanta trade center.
Still, there’s value to seeing those glossy images of our city onscreen, and the actual Vegas footage, including scenes shot at Aria and at the Luxor’s HyperX Esports Arena, makes the city look like a fun place for a shootout with ruthless mercenaries. The action is mostly incoherent, the dialogue is terrible, and the performances are perfunctory, but that’s what you get from a modern big-budget streaming movie. Just as Dan tries to sell Jessica on Vegas’ replicas of European cities, Wahlberg is primed to bring us a meager imitation of soulless studio filmmaking.