Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Greenland 2: Migration’ on VOD, a diminishing returns sequel to a surprise Gerard Butler hit
In lieu of the mighty disappointing realization that we’re never getting Geostorm 2: Lightning Does Indeed Strike Twice, we’ll have to settle for a different Gerard Butler-vehicle sequel, Greenland 2: Migration (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video). Its predecessor Greenland arrived to brighten the darker days of the Covid-19 pandemic with a comet-slams-into-Earth apocalyptic action saga that was far better than it probably needed to be, and was a surprise commercial success during its limited theatrical run and simultaneous VOD release. Thus, this follow-up, which hasn’t found much traction with audiences yet, likely because word got out that it reiterates much of what happened in the first movie with about 40-to-60 percent of the impact.
The Gist: QUICK RECAP: Greenland found John Garrity (Butler) chosen to be among a select few survivors of comet armageddon due to his engineering expertise. So he tucked his wife and diabetic son under his arms like footballs and made his way to the title country to live in a bunker with other people who theoretically could rebuild society, thus inspiring my conspiracy theory that Donald Trump watched the film and thought it was a great idea to put a survival facility there so he has a place to live after humanity rips itself apart, and that’s why he so badly wants the U.S. to acquire Greenland. BUT: I digress. Five years have passed since the events of the first movie. Most of the planet is a ravaged wasteland. The Eiffel Tower is snapped in half, the English Channel is dry and looks like the Moon, radiation storms pop up like whack-a-moles. The air is toxic in most areas, and in the safe-ish place where people live on the surface, madness and civil unrest reign.
We catch up with John as he wears a radiation suit to scavenge for whatever he can find outside the bunker. Inside an abandoned battleship, he finds a wrench and whoops like a slot machine just jackpotted all over his lap. He also just wants what anyone in a post-apocalypse wants, a decent cup of coffee of course, and has another cliche in his pocket, a Movie Cough, which, as we all know, is a harbinger of doom. Dooooooommmmm. But set that aside for a sec as we get into the tense cooped-upedness of the folks inside the bunker; it’s understandable since they’ve been crammed into bunkrooms and smelling each other’s farts for half a decade. John’s wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) is on the leadership braintrust panel and their teen son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis, replacing Roger Dale Floyd) goes to school and yearns to see the constellations someday. Careful what you wish for, dude.
Nathan seems to catch the eye of a cute female classmate and Allison argues to help some refugees despite dwindling resources and John uses the wrench to fix the water filtration system but forget about all that because an earthquake hits and quickly turns the bunker into a gravel pit. Panic. Pandemonium. Because they’re the protagonists and the star is one of the movie’s producers and has a Cough destined to give him a tragic arc that must conclude during the film’s final act, John, Allison and Nathan make it outta there just in the nick, and decide their best option is to find their way to France where the OG comet crater is rumored to be an Edenesque oasis with clean water and air that doesn’t give you a Cough. That’s as good an idea as any, I guess. But this world is increasingly armed with naturally occurring things that want to kill them, and the occasional person who could be nice or could be mean but you can’t tell until you get up close. And at this point, one can’t help but wonder if these poor movie protagonists haven’t been through enough already, but the answer to that is, obviously, no, no they haven’t.
Photo: ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Like the first Greenland, I’m left with the impression that Steven Spielberg’s 2004 War of the Worlds set the modern visual template for this type of ground-level POV disaster filmmaking. Greenland 2 also cribs a move or two from Children of Men, The Road, Mad Max: Fury Road and the non-monster parts of the Quiet Place movies.
Performance Worth Watching: Is Butler the new January Man, cough-coughing up a new genre exercise every dead-of-winter? He may have found his late-ish career niche.
Sex And Skin: Nada. But just wait til we get to Greenland 3: The Repopulation!
Photo: ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection
Our Take: Cough cough. Gerard Butler has cough endured so many of these cough cough cough things by now, by now he surely can cough cough grit his teeth and insist he’s fine, it’s just a little blood, in his sleep. Compare that to Baccarin’s I’m-not-so-sure-about-this-but-I’m-getting-paid, performance, where she minimally guts out moments of wrinkled-brow concern whether she’s worried about the health of her husband or nearly plummeting to her death in a crevasse. Some are just more committed to professionally executing cough cough warmed-over dreck than others.
Where the first Greenland was surprisingly engaging for being a middle-of-the-road Butler-vehicle action-drama, the sequel seems content to coast on the emotional fumes from the first movie as it throws One Damn Thing After Another at our hero and his family: Earthquakes, tsunamis, meteor showers, war zones, really tall gorges, lightning storms, sharknadoes, zombielanches, acidic tropical punch floods, etc. The plot plays like a checklist interspersed with moments of respite in which people give Butler and co. a kindly assist, blissfully unaware that they’re allowing into their stead the protagonists of an apocalyptic-survival disaster movie and therefore opening the door to calamity. Side and bit-part characters never fare particularly well in these things, do they?
Getting through Greenland 2 involves enduring some grim, cruddy dialogue – ranging from sober declarations about what used to be (“Is that the English Channel?” “It was”), the perennial action-movie exhortation “Go go go!” or the moment where the movie reviews itself, “You’ve gotta be kidding me” – as it works through a plot that feints at a human emotion or conflict, obliterates it with an action set piece, then repeats this two-step cycle about eight times. Meanwhile, we’re distracted by big thoughts about where and when the characters get enough gas for their vehicles, or how bad it smells inside a dozen-capacity lifeboat that may or may not have a toilet.
Give the movie this much: It’s tonally consistent in its overwrought melodramatic earnestness. The action set pieces are somewhat ambitious in their breadth despite offering nothing new to the genre whatsoever. The title hints at the miseries of refugees in real life, even if it lacks the chutzpah to say much about it. And the story moves with enough urgency to keep one modestly engaged. Modestly engaged until we realize Greenland 2 has pretty much treated us like a mouse in a maze privy to every whim of the VFX crew, and our reward is a big hunk of cheese at the end.
Our Call: Greenland 2 is just greenbland. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
