The Family Plan

Between the nonstop bickering and the convenient naivete, the titular brood in The Family Plan doesn’t make the most enjoyable company for a cross-country road trip.

Straining for laughs through exaggerations and contrivances, this predictable Mark Wahlberg vehicle recycles familiar concepts into an action-comedy recipe of stale cinematic leftovers.

“It’s never too late to become the man you’ve always wanted to be,” explains Buffalo used-car sales manager Dan (Wahlberg) to a customer. But you get the sense it really applies to him.

Indeed, Dan’s checkered past includes stints as a top-secret military operative and later as an assassin. But his wife, fitness instructor Jessica (Michelle Monaghan), and two teenage children — aspiring journalist Nina (Zoe Colletti) and online gamer Kyle (Van Crosby) — are blissfully unaware. They just figure he’s naturally averse to technology, credit cards, and social media.

However, Dan still remains a target thanks to some unfinished business. So when he’s discovered by enemies seeking revenge, Dan’s sheltered suburban life is suddenly uprooted. He packs up the family for a sudden “vacation” to Las Vegas, still looking for the right time to tell them his secret.

With danger subsequently lurking at every turn, we just wait for the narrative house of cards to eventually and inevitably collapse at the most inopportune time for Dan.

Wahlberg tries to hold everything together by balancing his dual identities, dispensing both one-liners and brawny machismo in familiar action-hero fashion.

British director Simon Cellan Jones (Some Voices) maximizes his shameless cute-baby closeups, cutting to the family’s mugging toddler regularly between wisecracks and set pieces.

The clumsy exposition in the screenplay by David Coggeshall (Prey) awkwardly tells us how much the characters care for one another, rather than showing us.

As it detours from one far-fetched subplot to the next — whether Nina confronting a cheating boyfriend, Jessica engaging in impromptu hijinks on a college campus, or Van being roped into a high-stakes gaming tournament on the Vegas strip — the film doesn’t generate much meaningful emotional depth or moral complexity.

Despite some scattered amusement, The Family Plan only occasionally sparks to life as a cat-and-mouse thriller with nondescript villains and cloudy motives, a final-act twist notwithstanding.

Rated PG-13, 118 minutes.