Filmgoers looking for a little escape from the more-horrific-than-fiction daily news out of America will be hard pressed to find it in a movie with “Greenland” and “Migration” in its title.
The sequel to the surprise post-apocalyptic Gerard Butler hit “Greenland 2: Migration” has impressive renditions of flooded cities, a half-melted Eiffel Tower and the canyons of the now-high-and-dry English Channel. But the plot is a perfunctory parade of fresh woes heaped upon our American family with its working class Scot (Butler) husband and father as they’re forced to venture through this hellscape.
Earthquakes and comet-debris meteor bombarment, volcanic rifts and superstorms and a tsunami and “marauders” from Eastern Europe menace the Garrity family in this ruined and irradiated Future Earth.
Even with life-death-of-a-family-and-civilization-itself-stakes director Ric Roman Waugh can’t squeeze urgency or suspense out of a single moment.
The “Migration” is just a succession of landscapes and seascapes turned catastrophic, with nothing that most dramaturges would describe as real “drama” about it.
Five years after Comet Clarke tore a big hole in the South of France and ended what passed for human civilization, the Garritys — scientist wife Allison (Morena Baccarin of “Deadpool”), now-teen-son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis) and blue collar-competent dad John (Butler) are still holed up with elite scientists and a few military folk in a post-apocalypse-bunker on the remains of Thune Airbase in Greenland.
John’s a whiz with anything that pumps, cranks-up or closes a circuit. That hazmat suit he dons is just for scavenger hunts around the ruins of the base and the Greenland beach where all sorts of handy things wash up — a destroyer, assorted lifeboats, etc.
The ruling council has no sooner decided that rescuing folks close enough by to have sent a distress signal is the humane thing to do when an earthquake causes the bunker complex to collapse.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me” aside, the Garritys vow to fight on even if the “Slowly dying is still DYING” faction of the bunker has a point.
Rumors of an Edenic “promised land” bursting with new life, breathable air and drinkable water in the comet’s gigantic crater make that the family’s next quest.
Butler is more stoic than action-heroic here, and no additions to the cast have enough screen time to make more than a modest impression.
There’s little emotion to anything that comes at them and us here as the screenwriters cut and paste one disaster movie cliche after another on the screen and the effects crew does their damnedest to at least make it all look real. Butler’s go-to director Waugh returns from the first “Greenland,” the “Has Fallen” films and “Kandahar,” and appears to have rushed through this shoot to get the picture away from the actors and into the hands of the effects folks ASAP. Big mistake.
The lone joke from an epoch when humor is dead is how quickly humanity forgets the difference between “classical rock” and yacht rock.
What’s left is “2012/Day After Tomorrow” disastrous and impressively so, with British and Icelandic locations turned into a world without civilization. Human interactions, human conflict (dog eat dog Darwinism), human intellect and human resolve never made it into the finished film.
If I want something this disastrous and heartless centered around Greenland, I’ll log onto the news feed at Bluesky.
Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity
Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Amber Rose Rivah, Roman Griffin Davis and Sophie Thompson.
Credits: Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, scripted by Mitch LaFortune and Chris Sparling, based on characters created by Chris Sparling. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:38
