Movie Nation

Making art — or at least a genre thriller — during the COVID lockdown is a daunting task, so hats off to the filmmakers of “Safer at Home.”

It’s more impressive as an exercise than thrilling, with a no-name cast and limited “action.” But they conjured up a movie out of a Zoom call split screen and a couple of handheld selfie-chases. In a medium that lives and dies by cinema’s control of time and the escalating suspense, which are largely a product of editing, they took a Hitchcockian shot at making movie that’s got very little editing.

“Safer at Home” is almost all performance and mise en scene. YOU try parking three couples and a single woman on four sets with limited visible backgrounds, captured on four split screens and getting a thriller out of that.

Thousands of years of live theater prove it can be done, but narrowing the frame of the story and the “world” you’re show in it requires a different way of thinking and a one-arm-tied-behind-your-back approach.

Three years into the pandemic (Dear Lord, let that NOT be the case.) and America ‘s lockdown has become the New Normal. Millions upon millions have died and curfews have gotten seriously strict.

But Evan’s (Dan J. Johnson) is having a birthday, so girlfriend Jen (Jocelyn Hudon) arranges a video conference birthday party.

They’re in LA, as is pal Ollie (Michael Kupisk) and his new live-in girlfriend Mia (Emma Lahana). Ben and Liam (Adwin Brown and Daniel Robaire) are in New York, and Harper (Alisa Allapach) is in Austin. That doesn’t mean they can’t share some laughs and a glass of champagne with their friend.

Maybe even a game or two. Maybe, if SOMEbody’s mailed “gift” reaches the other three locales, a little “Japanese” “off-the-chain Molly.

Damn, we’re still doing “off the chain” in the future? I lose that bet.

“Tonight is about forgetting…just one night, with NO consequences!”

After a little back and forth, they all ingest, they take up a round of “Never have I ever,” hard feelings come out and something bad happens, something the police would want to know about.

The movie scrambles to undo the “something bad,” and failing that, to keep the cops from finding out what happened and who might have caused it. They keep the conference going as assistance is offered, an escape is attempted and the evening escalates.

It doesn’t, really — escalate I mean. The little bit of running with a cell camera and the like amps up the energy enough to make us realize how dully static most of what came before was.

As with any movie with lots of split screen, figuring out which screen to concentrate on is an issue. As this was created during quarantine, finding something fascinating or at least interesting for characters to do within the confines of the four cinematic spaces can be a challenge.

And unless you think something covering her mouth and going “Oh my God” and somebody stumbling off to the toilet to throw up is scintillating cinema, you’d have to agree with me that the picture fails at this, too.

Never breaking free of its tight-screen limitations, it’s hard for any performance to register, although Hudon and Allapach have a close-up moment or two. Some of the most demanding acting takes place when characters step into the background of their one-fourth-size frame. Good luck getting the Academy’s attention with your power of emoting in that. We can’t even see faces.

Director and co-writer Will Wernick lets us see the storytelling problem-solving going on here, which is kind of fun. But the paucity of ideas is as obvious as the run-time, which is deceptive.

The film is bookended with long montages of pandemic coverage of the twice-impeached “former social influencer” botching the response to COVID-19. There’s even less “drama” scripted and shot here than you think.

Wernick is making a habit of “gimmick” movies like this. “No Escape” and “Escape Room” were his previous feature film outings, and “No Escape” at least had a lot more incident and actions and stuff going on.

“Safer at Home” is so trapped in its own gimmick, so myopic, so limited in action and lacking close-ups that build viewer empathy with characters, this becomes just an interested “failed” exercise.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, drug above, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Jocelyn Hudon, Emma Lahana, Alisa Allapach, Adwin Brown, Dan J. Johnson, Daniel Robaire, Michael Kupisk

Credits: Directed by Will Wernick, script by Will Wernick, Lia Bozonelis. A Voltage film, a Vertical release.

Running time: 1:25

Race and racism aren’t at the heart of the South African Apartheid-era legal drama “Shepherds and Butchers.” That’s almost certainly a flaw in the film, as the black victims of its central crime are not the focus, merely background for its story in a “Mississippi Burning” sort of way.

But in telling this “inspired by true events” story of a death penalty case of a white man murdering seven black men, the inhumanity of The State is exposed and its cost — to the oppressors who administer it, to the very government’s legitimacy in whose name these horrors are perpetrated — gets at race and racism indirectly and in ways that cut deep.

Steve Coogan stars as John Weber, an activist attorney whose issue isn’t Apartheid itself, but the death penalty. He is arm-twisted into taking on a hopeless case, a mass murder we witness in the film’s grim opening scene. His only defense?

“This was no act for which there are no legal consequences,” he insists. Circumstances triggered a mental state in his client, he will argue, that will make the court question “whether the accused can be legally responsible for what happened.”

The judge looks perplexed. The prosecutor (the glorious Andrea Riseborough) all but rolls her eyes. But that’s what Weber will do — poke at this case through the prism of his own activism.

“Nobody gets away with killing seven people unless they’re the police,” Weber quips in private.

When young Leon Labuschagne (Garion Dowds) turned what looked like road rage into what seems like a racist mass shooting, he was at the end of a very bad day in a string of tortuous awful days. Leon is a warder, a guard at “Maximum,” the nearby Pretoria prison. His job is on death row.

We learn that Leon took the job young to avoid being drafted. This was during South Africa’s long war with guerillas and government forces in neighboring Angola, the late ’80s. Leon avoided murderous conflict by taking an essential, draft-immune job caring for, preparing and helping hang inmates sentenced to death.

In the year Leon was on the job, 164 people were hung, and he was present for all of those. On the day he snapped, they’d hung another seven — all at once.

Leon is reluctant to even have a defense mounted, reluctant to go into details, reluctant to make excuses and reluctant to take the court, via questioning, back to grimly awful events that might have sent him over the edge that night.

Weber’s activism on this subject has been in the abstract because of the secrecy with which South Africa carried out its executions. He leans on a special forces (usually deployed against Black Africans) brother in law for insight, Weber and we appreciate what the violence dictated by a white supremacist government is costing them all.

The film, based on a novel by South African attorney Brian Cox, recalls a South Africa where mass executions were common and the approved manner of doing things. Weber knows enough to be appalled. His co-counsel Pedrie (Eduan van Jaarsveldt) is anxious to save the accused. But he is the first pushback Weber gets from this line of attack.

Pedrie ticks off the terrible crimes of those Leon executed, hissing “Get rid of them, for GOOD” as the only solution. But as the trial digs into the secrecy, state-sponsored killing done without outside witnesses, the inhumanity of the system and the guards who perform it become clear. The chaos of the slaughter, the ugly details of what happens before, during and after a hanging is exposed and Pedrie and we are given pause. That snap judgement doesn’t seem so unassailable after all.

The details can’t help but bring to mind The Holocaust — wholesale slaughter “processed” by desensitized killers, all a part of a “machine” run by the heartless, criminally culpable “State.” What this does to everyone concerned is monstrous.

“Shepherds and Butchers” keeps the families of the victims at almost arm’s length, to its detriment. It barely gives us a feeling for the scores of the condemned Leon meets, feeds and must watch die. But even that is almost enough because the execution scenes are a nightmare — brutal and awful even when everything goes “right.” And we’ve learned with “drug cocktails” in this country and any place that still carries out hanging can tell you, sometimes things go wrong.

I found the picture moving in spite of its seeming unwillingness to wholly grapple with race and Coogan’s unwillingness to master the Afrikaner accent. He’s a gifted mimic, and Riseborough manages it. What gives?

But what it does wrestle with is profound, and profoundly disturbing.

MPA Rating:  R for disturbing and violent content 

Cast: Steve Coogan, Garion Dowds, Robert Hobbs, Eduan van Jaarsveldt, Nicola Hanekom and Andrea Riseborough.

Credits: Directed by Oliver Schmitz, script by Brian Cox, based on a novel by Chris Marnewick. A Distant Horizon film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:46

In 1971, the stars of the new thriller “Klute,” Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, took off on a tour of U.S. military bases. When they embarked for the bases of the Pacific Rim — Hawaii and the Philippines, Japan and Okinawa — they brought a film crew with them.

They’d sing songs, perform sketches and poetry and dramatic readings, gathering their material from “GI newspapers around the world.” It was, Fonda said then, “political vaudeville.” It was, she says now, designed “to be the opposite of the ‘pro war’ Bob Hope shows” of the time.

But while they would be performing for thousands of troops, they wouldn’t be allowed on the actual bases the sailors, airmen, Marines and soldiers were stationed in. Because when you name your tour “F.T.A.” and the GIs know that to mean “F— the Army,” officialdom was never going to let that happen. Even if the show’s theme song (singers Len Chandler and Rita Martinson were on board) changed the acronym to “FREE the Army,” that was never going up the flagpole of any U.S. military base.

Filmmaker Francine Parker’s documentary “F.T.A.” is an often amusing, occasionally raucous and always musical memoir of that tour, slapped together for a quick release back in the election year of 1972, a release that never happened.

“Long-suppressed” film? Maybe. But now this fascinating artifact is available for mass consumption, restored by Kino Lorber and earning a theatrical and digital release on March 5.

A blend of comedy, song and dance, drama and male and female servicemember interviews, it’s funny, biting and tuneful, and it takes you right back there if you lived through it. And it might be an eye-opener for activist “Ok, Boomer” millennials.

Fonda sings duets with actress/folkie Holly Near, a goofy riff on “Carolina in the Morning” that goes “Nothing felt diviner than to be in Indochina making MOoooooney.”

Sutherland memorizes and mesmerizes performing a long monologue from Dalton Trumbo’s 1930s anti-war novel “Johnny Got his Gun.”

And folkie Len Chandler leads sing-alongs of some downright hilarious anti-war tunes, some composed expressly for this tour.

“First they draft your ass, then they uniform your ass, they arm your ass and then they train your ass. And then they bust your ass and then they break your ass and then they SHIP your ass and then they shoot your ass…”

He’s the stand-out performer here, but catching Sutherland channeling early George Carlin as he broadcasts a search and destroy mission in the manner of a college football play-by-play man is a hoot.

“The Hueys filled with our guys are landing, but no sign of Charlie…You know, the Vietcong are having a VERY good season.”

Fonda jokes with large (not “official” Hope base-visit “huge”) crowds, adding shows when they run out of room for the first performance, straining to get through all the material because “apparently, you have to be back in prison by midnight.”

None of which will play as funny to the generation — some of them veterans — who labeled her “Hanoi Jane.” And truthfully, despite the tour’s diverse cast and some stinging, funny seqments, not all of the material is aging well.

There’s a not-that-subtle suggestion of passive resistance and insubordination in some of their messaging, because that’s what prompted the tour. A lot of men and women in uniform were questioning the rationale, the inhumanity and the legality of what they were being ordered to do.

Over half the crew of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Coral Sea had petitioned against returning to action off the coast of Vietnam, an unheard of and nearly mutinous act, prior to this tour.

Fonda sat for a 20 minute interview that will be attached to this release, remembering both the impetus for the tour and the times it took place in. She won’t win over or convince anyone who ever called her “Hanoi Jane,” but she’s on the money in pointing out that even much of the military had turned against the war by ’70-71.

The proof is in every sailor, airman or soldier who recalls feeling “I owed my country at least two or three years of my life” who had the courage to ask “What the hell are we in Vietnam for?” on camera for this film.

MPA Rating: unrated, violent images, profanity

Cast: Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Rita Martinson, Len Chandler, Paul Mooney, Peter Boyle and Holly Near

Credits: Directed by Francine Parker. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:37

Let us go back to the days when homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name,” when women discovered, with no help from science or literature of public figures as examples, their same sex attraction for other women.

The lesbian period piece is practically a genre unto itself, with sexual “awakening” stories “Lady on Fire,” “A Quiet Passion,” “Collette,” “The Favourite,” “Ammonite” and “The Bostonians” and others finding quiet desperation in an age where women were “property” and propriety lashed them into corsets and arranged marriages.

A running thread through such dramas is their secrecy, with passions heightened because of that “hidden/forbidden love” secrecy.

“The World to Come” adds little to that proven formula. The novelty here is that two rural, little-schooled 19th century farmwives find love and passion with almost no outside influences, nothing to tell them if what they are feeling is unique and freakish, or why exactly it might be “wrong.”

The film, starring two fine British actresses — Katherine Waterson and Vanessa Kirby — and based on a Jim Shepard short story, may have a primitive not-quite-frontier setting and hints of the brutality of that. But it’s otherwise just as idealized and romanticized as the many versions of this story among aristocracy, wealth, fashion and always-perfect hair and makeup.

Waterston (“Alien: Covenant”) is Abigail, an upstate New York farm wife who loses herself in her chores and “responsibilities” and her “ledger,” a daily journal she keeps, at her husband’s (Casey Affleck) suggestion as a way of charting the emotional life of their farm and their family.

“Family” is a term she might put in the past tense. They lost their daughter to diphtheria the preview fall. Thus “with little pride and less hope we begin the New Year,” she writes and narrates.

“I have become my grief.”

But 1856 and its cooking, mending, cow-milking and chicken-tending, changes for Abigail when a new couple moves into the farm next door. Finney (Christopher Abbott of “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”) is an officious Bible-quoting boor. But Tallie (Kirby, of “The Crown” and “Pieces of a Woman”) is a redheaded, freckled vision of vivaciousness to lonely, provincial Abigail.

“Her skin had an under-blush of rose and violet,” Abigail narrates, so smitten that “I had to look away.”

Thus do they strike up an intimate friendship, discussing their lives, their men, their chores and their dreams. Tallie seems to be on strike from an unhappy marriage of obligation. Abigail finds herself neglecting her own share of the farm labor and even more reluctant to abandon the grief-induced sexual separation from husband Dryer.

The women share poetry and longing looks, with Kirby (Natalie Dormer, The Next Generation) devouring Waterston with her eyes, tempting the never-left-this-county plain Jane with her voluminous, curly locks.

The husbands respond to this attachment and distraction with Old Testament fury and not-quite-direct threats, on Finny’s part — “I have certain expectations and you have certain duties” — and bewilderment on Dryer’s — “There is something going on between us that I cannot unravel.”

For all the immaculate perfection that the simmering might-become-lovers are filmed in, director Mona Fastvold takes some pains to show the cruelty of the times, the harshness and isolation, even in the long-settled but still underpopulated rural East of mid-19th century America.

The pitiful screams of pigs being slaughtered, the unforgiving and relentless winter, the grim risks of running into strange men on the road or having no doctor to fetch when fevers set in all remind us of the stresses these characters and these marriages start out with it. Add potential infidelity of a Leviticus unleashing nature and you appreciate the desperation of these women, the dire circumstances they want to escape — if only for a few hours –and the consequences of the risks they’re taking.

All of which, frankly, we’ve seen on screen many times before. Such period pieces have become as commonplace as “coming out” stories.

The leads are riveting in their respective roles, even if we never forget how idealized the characters seem.

Norwegian actress turned director Fastvold (The Sleepwalker”) modulates the tone of the picture and the feelings of the characters with weather, a greyscale of wintry gloom until they meet, the alarm of a whiteout blizzard, a little sunshine almost breaking through as the would-be lovers cautiously begin their flirtation.

Romania nicely substitutes for Appalachian upstate New York, and the film has a grimy air of mud, blood and struggle about it.

But lovely as it sometimes is and impressive as the cast may be, it holds too few surprises and dramatic peaks to make it a stand-out in a genre that’s fast-becoming old 19th century hat.

MPA Rating: R for some sexuality/nudity 

Cast: Katherine Waterston, Vanessa Kirby, Christopher Abbott and Casey Affleck.

Credits: Directed by Mona Fastvold, script by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, based on a short story by Jim Shepard. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:38

I am an audience of one at an Orlando AMC.

That can only mean one thing. “The World to Come” is a Bleecker Street “release,” the latest from “The witness protection program of film distribution.”

“No Escape Room,” the latest horror riff on the “escape room from Hell” theme, has the building blocks of a solid genre thriller.

Five people undertake a mysterious small town escape room experience. The puzzle-it-out clues are challenging as all get out and the house’s clockwork trapdoors, hollow walls and hidden recesses are given a workout.

But something supernatural starts to happen and…there IS no ESCAPE!

The best ways to botch that are failing to keep the cast’s energy up, set-up to set-up, letting them slow-walk something that by definition and design is a fast-paced “ticking clock” thriller. Pay more attention to the sets in wide shot than the imperiled characters in unnerving close-ups. Put more effort in the clues and clever ways designed to solve them (numbers written on the whirling blades of a ceiling fan, only decipherable is you can figure out what in the room might give you a strobe effect) than you do to pacing.

Pedestrian shot selection and editing finish off any sense of “urgency” that the story is meant to generate.

“No Escape Room” probably went wrong in the storyboard process. Pre-planning is a must for any shooting script. On a tiny budget with a tight schedule, as Hitchcock preached, a detailed shot-by-shot storyboard can ensure you get what you need for the editor to make your thriller just fly by.

The story? Disinterested, lip-glossed/phone-distracted teen (Jeni Ross) takes a day trip to the country with Dad (Mark Ghanimé). Horseback riding is out, a car breakdown leaves them in a small town which has a garage, a diner and apparently, an “escape room” in a Tudor style mansion outside the town limits.

Kathryn Davis plays the escape room nerd, the one who keeps saying “You guys are new to this” and who refuses to take what they find themselves going through at face value, all “part of the show.” Hamza Haq is her disinterested boyfriend and Dennis Andres plays the wild card, the guy who jokingly calls himself “a plant, part of the show,” but who isn’t.

“So is that a clue, or just really good ‘atmosphere?'”

They surrender their phones and set off on their hour-long quest to “free” five people who “disappeared” in the clutches of “The Inventor” long ago. And then weird stuff, seeing and hearing “echoes” of themselves in mid-escape, in future escape, in their death throes or what have you throws them off.

The lighting and set design and decor are striking. There’s a preview “movie” on 8mm celluloid that is properly surreal and creepy.

But the clues are more interesting than the deaths or near-death-experiences, the characters as thinly developed as they often are in such genre pictures and the resolution has a fillip meant to make us forget how drab and lifeless most of what preceded it was. It’s not terrible, just not up to snuff.

The best advice for getting out of this “Room” is don’t ever go in it.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Jeni Ross, Mark Ghanimé, Hamza Haq, Kathryn Davis, Dennis Andrews and Brianna Barnes.

Credits: Directed by Alex Merkin, script by Jesse Mittelstadt.A Marvista Film on Netflix

Running time: 1:25

This trailer has a touch of whizbang about it and is slated for Jan. 2022 release.

And for those keeping score at home, the presence of Penelope Cruz and Lupita N’Yongo means this has two Oscar winners in its cast.

Teaching and treason in the run up to The War. This looks promising.

A grave injustice has been done by a heartless, greedy and smug villain.

A corrupt, easily-gamed system has been twisted and an old woman’s freedom and fortune have been stolen.

And as you watch, slack-jawed, as “I Care a Lot” takes its deep dive into dark comedy, you wonder how this wrong will be righted, who will save the day, rescue the victim and right wrongs?

The Russian mob, maybe?

This clever and darker than dark thriller gives us villains to hiss at and villains to root for. But at the end of the day, when evil is done and hope is thin, “justice” and revenge blur. In the movies, at least, we bay for an avenger to spill some blood.

Writer-director J Blakeson, who gave us the Gemma Arterton thriller “The Disappeareance of Alice Creed,” stacks the deck and deals the cards in this mean, improbable laugh-out-loud thriller. And the first way he stacks that deck is casting.

Rosemund Pike is Marla Grayson, a guardianship attorney who is there to make late-life decisions for senior clients. She takes guardianship of those deemed unable to care for themselves by their doctors and a family court judge. Don’t challenge her in court for putting your father or mother in a home when you wouldn’t make that hard decision for her. Don’t blame her for draining her finances as she does. Don’t show up unprepared for a little courtroom shaming, a lot of tough love and a few cozy “the court decideds” snapped out by her favorite judge (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.), who never finds her anything but reasonable.

“Caring, sir, is my JOB,” she preaches. And the wall of her office is decorated with legions of clients under her “care” and subject to her billings. Marla cruelly and ruthlessly uses and abuses the law, and she does not play fair.

“Playing fair is a joke invented by rich people to keep the rest of us poor.”

“Gone Girl” Pike is what we call “on the nose casting.” Calling the blonde, imperious and unflappable Marla a “bitch” just gets her feminist back up, and does a great disservice to dogs. A dog wouldn’t do what she does.

And then one day, she lands a “cherry,” a little old lady of means and no known family served up by a colluding, corrupt doctor. As she’s played by sweet little Oscar winner Dianne Wiest, well, we fear for her and grit our teeth over the swank “care facility” and its armed guard, locked bulletproof glass doors, the medications used to “control” her, the cell phone that’s taken from her and the smirk of the monster who put her here.

“No known family” is key. Because there’s family, and once he (Peter Dinklage, in Hitler hair and goatee) finds out, there’s going to be hell to pay. This guy scares people. This guy hurts people. And when he sends a smarmy, oily attorney (Chris Messina) to point out this “mistake” to you and your business and life partner (Eiza González of “Baby Driver,””Hobbs & Shaw”), maybe you ought to listen.

The most delicious scenes in “I Care A Lot” let us revel in the oblique threats and counter threats, the escalating measures each side takes in the tug-of-war that begins with this meeting of legal minds.

“She has very powerful…friends,” oily attorney purrs, “who can make life very…uncomfortable for you.”

Is that a threat?

“That’s just…data for you to collate.”

Marla won’t be bluffed. And we’ve established that she bristles at any hint of “threats from a man.” Game on, with a drugged, imprisoned senior citizen — her house and car sold to “pay her bills,” her safe deposit box looted — as the pawn.

That senior? The drugs wear off just enough to make the only threat that matters to Marla.

“You’re in trouble NOW!”

Blakeson sets his comic thriller just within the realm of the plausible, just outside the probable. If you haven’t dealt with elder care bureaucracy, any lawyer dealing with elder-care issues, an estate attorney, a nursing home that gives you cause for alarm or suspicions, you will.

That’s what makes its predatory lawyer/anti-heroine so infuriating. Pike just bathes in our loathing, poker-faces her contempt and takes Marla over the line. Marla knows she’s doing wrong, but is so good at “projection” that she “whatabouts” her way out of every moral quandary.

Dinklage gives us an avenging angel with a sweet tooth, a bad temper and a soft spot for “Momma.” Damned if we don’t root for the Russian mobster to have his justice and teach this hateful predator a lesson. But even a mobster has got to at least try and “keep it legal.”

The third act lurches into “get out of jail free” cards, illogical reactions to the threat of imminent death, twisty “escapes” and what not. “Care” made me stop caring for a bit there.

But Pike, Dinklage and Blakeson never let up on the evil they’re willing to show, the judgement they withhold and the “justice” that seems, increasingly, like a distant mirage we can only glare at in bitter rage and no bemused resignation.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout and some violence 

Cast: Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eiza Gonzalez, Diane Wiest, Chris Messina, Isaiah Whitlock, Jr.

Credits: Scripted and directed by J. Blakeson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

Just our luck. We finally get a decent disaster movie, and it arrives in the middle of a pandemic.

Some people saw it, but most theaters were closed, so the vast majority of us missed the apocalyptic effects, high tension and narrow escapes of “Greenland.” At least now it’s coming to home video.

Gerard Butler, a sturdy presence in larger-than-life spectacles, anchors a good cast in what one has to say is a most topical and grimly plausible “end times” thriller. He plays an Atlanta-based structural engineer who must save life, limb and family when Comet Clarke comes calling.

But there’s trouble at home, problems in his marriage to Allie (Morena Baccarin, “Deadpool’s” better half). Seven year-old Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) is concerned, but perhaps more worried about this fragment-filled comet that’s heading for Earth.

When the emergency alert message comes in that John, Allie and Nathan “have been selected,” ordering them to Robbins AFB in Warner-Robbins, the background noise the adults haven’t been locking in on hits home. Things are about to get “real.”

The film is about their quest to get there, or find alternative transport to Greenland, where the government set up a survival bunker after watching “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon,” and we first heard the phrase “planet killer.”

“Angel Has Fallen” director Ric Roman Waugh, who took over this STX production when Neill Blomkamp backed out, keeps “Greenland” in motion and the script (by Chris Sparling, who “Buried” Ryan Reynolds) keeps our characters in peril.

If it’s the death raining from the skies, it’s the Darwinian response Americans expect when the chips are down. Separate the family to increase the number of obstacles — the xenophobic, the conspiracy-minded — with everybody’s inner-goon coming out with doom hanging over them.

Those “we were selected” wristbands create a short term class war. Tearful pleas from neighbors, chaos at the various departure points and periodic rains of fire all stand in their way.

The level of organization, the duty-bound military sticking to their jobs, the NASA briefings (heard, not seen), all create a texture in Waugh’s tapestry of gloom and doom.

The most chilling moment comes early as John and Nathan turn their eyes to see what everybody is gawking at skyward. It’s an air armada, the first signs of an evacuation that nobody has been told about…yet. It reminded me of that scene in “The Day After” when a crowd at a Lawrence, Kansas football game stares at missiles heading skyward. A real “Uh oh” moment.

The best movies in this genre feed us dread, dangle hope and hit us with pathos. Scott Glenn provides that as Allie’s aged father, an old man on the farm with The End in sight.

Pictures like this have their formula and are careful to leave no trope unturned. Why? Because the formula works and we know that. We wait for those tropes, like comfort food. “Earthquake” to “2012,” “Deep Impact” to “The Wave,” from bloated and dumb to plausible and smart, disaster filmmakers defy our expectations and cravings at their own peril.

“Greenland” doesn’t often surprise, but it never disappoints.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of disaster action, some violence, bloody images and brief strong language 

Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn, Andrew Bachelor and Hope Davis

Credits: Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, script by Chris Sparling. An STX film, a Universal Home Video release.

Running time: 1:59