‘Greenland 2: Migration’ movie review: Gerard Butler does all the heavy lifting in limp sequel

Watching Greenland 2: Migration, one almost feels as though one is in a time capsule watching all those big disaster movies from the ‘90s, in single-screen theatres that looked like palaces with velvet curtains and chandeliers.

It was the time of slides saying “chatterboxes keep quiet,” and where popcorn, cheese sandwiches or curry puffs came hot in aluminium trays at the interval.

It was the time of radioactive lizards with eyes as big as Gol Gumbaz, hurtling comets, rising seas and an alien susceptible to a cold. But once you realise it is 30 years on in a world that has lost its innocence to a rapacious virus, you are less willing to grant as much leeway to a lazily made sequel.

Greenland in 2020 was a critical and commercial success with Gerard Butler playing the world-weary action hero‑family man‑tech expert, John Garrity. A comet named Clarke (after the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke) was scheduled to hit the Earth and end life as we know it.

At the end of the movie, after many trials, John, with his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin) and insulin-dependent son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis takes over from Roger Dale Floyd) reach a bunker in Greenland just as a large chunk of the comet hits the earth.

Five years later, the earth is still not a particularly safe space with earthquakes, radiation, tsunamis and other jolly things blighting existence. John is now a scout, while also attending to repairs in the bunkers, owing to his training as a structural engineer. At a meeting, there is discussion of food supplies running low and a decision to be taken on whether to respond to a call for help.

While the mean army man reasonably says they cannot feed anyone more, Dr. Amina (Amber Rose Revah) asks for the matter to be put to vote and when the snowcat is sent out to get the refugees, an earthquake destroys the bunker.

Garrity and others head to the coast, fight over lifeboats, drift without food, water or fuel to England and then go on to France where the Clarke crater is a new Eden where the air is fresh and land is fertile.

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Greenland 2: Migration suffers from a woeful lack of logic, even of the film kind. How is it that everyone looks well fed and groomed even as we are repeatedly told they are running out of food? How are there still bullets given the way people are shooting at each other? How are vehicles still running on fuel?

Why are robbers or insurgents fighting in an area controlled by the army? And of course, the bridge across the English channel, which is now a dry wasteland, has to collapse exactly at the moment when our heroic gang is creeping across.

Every time there is a crisis, it is as if the makers got bored and decided to move on. So despite running out of fuel, the lifeboat drifts to Liverpool, and Nate’s diabetes is reduced to “pack all the insulin.” Still it is fun to see the ever-dependable Butler do his melancholic routine and that is about all one can say for the haphazardly conceived sequel.

Greenland 2: Migration is currently running in theatres