‘Greenland 2: Migration’ Review: Gerard Butler Searches for Life in a Timely but Tedious Sequel

Ric Roman Waugh's "Greenland" was a surprisingly good massive comet movie — this somber follow-up doesn't make the same impact.

Rock-brained Gerard Butler thrillers are supposed to be amusingly inane — not uncannily relevant.

Arriving at the end of our first Covid year (good times, good times), 2020’s “Greenland” was somehow both at once. An earnest disaster movie about a Scottish-American engineer who tries to keep his family alive as a giant comet screams its way toward our planet, Ric Roman Waugh’s resourceful and relatively grounded epic was sober enough to feel like the “Deep Impact” to “Geostorm”’s “Armageddon.” The film crashed down onto Earth at a moment as audiences worldwide reeled from the helplessness of their own global crisis. It was as dumb as the flaming rocks that seemed to follow Butler’s character from Atlanta to the Arctic, but it resonated with the broadly recognizable truth of living through a catastrophe that not even a beefcake like King Leonidas could wrestle into submission. 

Almost six years later, Butler and Waugh have done it again. And by “it,” I mean “make another exceedingly stupid ‘Greenland’ movie that manages to dovetail with one of the most pressing dilemmas of the current moment, and does so with an emotional acuity that belies the programmatic oafishness of its whole general vibe.” Oh, and by “one of the most pressing dilemmas of the current moment,” I thankfully don’t mean our demented president’s recurrent threats of taking Greenland by force; timely as Waugh’s franchise has been, this sequel is very much not about Butler and his fellow survivors defending their post-apocalyptic bunker from a drunk Pete Hegseth and his ultra-embarrassing “Department of War.”

Per its title, “Greenland 2: Migration” is a “there but for the grace of god” story about the uncertain search for stability in a world that has us all at its mercy. It’s a story about the universal impulse to find a sustainable home for our families, a drive that should affirm the root humanity of exiles, refugees, and various other desperate foreigners rather than inspire the local population to deny it. It’s also a story about Gerard Butler being very, very sad.

Screenwriters Mitchell LaFortune and Chris Sparling get to the heart of the matter by flipping the script on the premise of the previous film. That one saw John Garrity (Butler) maximizing his privilege by leading his estranged wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their diabetic son, Nathan, to an extinction-proof shelter that had been reserved for people like them.

This one starts with that shelter imploding under the strength of a massive radiation storm that displaces the Garrity clan in a hurry, and leaves them on a lifeboat to Europe in the wretched hope that someone on the continent will offer them a safe place to plant new roots. If that doesn’t work out, perhaps John can guide his family to the crater left by the comet in southern France; it’s rumoured the area has been protected from the poison air, killer waves, and bouncing meteors that have made the rest of the planet such a hellscape.

It should go without saying that “Greenland: Migration” doesn’t belabor the point. This isn’t really an ideas movie. That a Gerard Butler vehicle even gestures toward the short-sighted narcissism of closed borders is enough to make it a categorically different experience than (wonderful) dreck like Jean-François Richet’s “Plane” or (plodding) dreck like Waugh’s own “Angel Has Fallen,” as the director continues to use this cataclysmic franchise — which operates on a scale, if not a budget, considerably larger than any of his other work — to paint a rather intimate portrait of human perspective at the end of the world. 

To its significant detriment, “Migration” is a far more generic and action-oriented movie than its predecessor, which had the benefit of watching civilization get pulled apart at the seams. John’s relationship with Allison was pretty threadbare, to say the least, and their son Nathan was never more than a cherubic insulin crisis waiting to happen, but the chaos around them was galvanized by a real and vivid sense of what happens to people when society reveals the pure survivalism at its core. Although it had its fair share of raining fire and extinction-sized tidal waves, the original “Greenland” hinged on finely wrought displays of separation, selflessness, and betrayal.

This sequel doesn’t really do any of that — at least not to a meaningful degree. It kicks off with a “Death Stranding”-esque sequence of John scavenging for supplies on Greenland’s toxic surface, devotes a few minutes to life inside the Department of Homeland Security bunker (it’s bad, and getting worse so fast that Allison has to convince the other survivors to welcome a group of starving outsiders), and spends the rest of the movie chasing the Garrity clan across Europe in a series of ho-hum setpieces that fail to generate the same kind of race-against-the-clock suspense that came easy to the previous movie. They also make the environment seem bizarrely determined to kill these particular characters. 

I get that the Earth has become a hostile nightmare, but the predictability of a windstorm blowing through, or a meteor shower raining down, or a skirmish breaking out every time the Garritys are in a vulnerable moment proves wearying, and the script’s emphasis on the spectacle of its natural disasters — rather than on how people react to them — results in a sequel that loses sight of what gave the first “Greenland” its friction. “How will a sexy gun-toting Frenchman react to John and his family?” is a lot more exciting than “will Nathan, now played by Roman Griffin Davis, be able to shimmy across a chasm before the ground crumbles apart on both sides of his ladder?” The answer to the second question is considerably easier to guess than the first. 

While the sober tone remains, as does Butler’s likably monotone brogue, replicating the road trip structure of the original yields limited returns, and the loss of jagged supporting performances from the likes of Hope Davis and Scott Glenn is too great for the sequel’s assorted redshirts to make up (Ken Nwosu’s Obi is the exception who proves the rule, as the helpful Nigerian immigrant reinforces the movie’s foundation in the five minutes before he’s obliterated by a fragment of space rock).

For their part, the Garrity family is asked to carry more weight with less substance, and their non-characters struggle to support the emotional burden of an intimate life-or-death journey, the destination of which is a lot sillier than it was the last time around. Still, for all of the been-there, survived-that tedium we get here, it’s hard to imagine that many other white-bread Hollywood movies this year will so thoroughly internalize the reality that migration is a heroic act of survival. 

Grade: C

Lionsgate will release “Greenland: Migration” in theaters on Friday, January 9.

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