By now, most moviegoers know that January is Hollywood’s “dumping ground” month – a time when studios release the movies they aren’t quite sure what to do with. It’s usually a mix of forgettable horror flicks, uninspired sequels, and painfully unfunny comedies. So, it feels oddly appropriate that Greenland 2: Migration doesn’t just fit with that tradition; it seems tailor-made for it. A big, dumb disaster sequel that takes itself far more seriously than it should, while leaving viewers wondering why it was even made at all. The first Greenland was a modest VOD hit back in late 2020, offering an escape for audiences stuck at home during a global pandemic. What made it work was its simplicity: a massive comet hurtles toward Earth and one ordinary family, the Garritys, desperately races to reach a military bunker in Greenland before civilization is obliterated. It was grounded, human, and tense, driven by a ticking clock and unpredictable stakes. When the credits rolled, the story felt complete. No cliffhangers, no franchise bait, just a satisfying, self-contained thriller.

Greenland 2: Migration immediately undoes all of that. Picking up five years later, it reframes the original’s ending as merely the opening chapter of an ongoing saga – despite having very little new story to tell. John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their now-teenage son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis, replacing the original’s Roger Dale Floyd) are still underground. Clinging to life in the bunker while the surface remains toxic and uninhabitable. Supplies are running low; tensions are rising thanks to overcrowding, and the bunker itself is falling apart. Naturally, it doesn’t take long for their fragile stability to come crashing down, literally, when an earthquake reduces the bunker to rubble and forces the survivors back to the surface.

Alongside a handful of fellow survivors, the Garritys escape in a lifeboat and quickly stumble onto the sequel’s flimsy hook: a scientist (Amber Rose Revah) in the group confirms a rumor that an impact crater in France, left by the comet from the first film, may hold the key to helping civilization begin again. It’s a thin premise, but the movie treats it like a momentous revelation. Armed with this knowledge, the Garritys and their rapidly dwindling group of fellow survivors set out across a wasteland populated with every post-apocalyptic cliché imaginable. Their journey takes them across the Atlantic, through a partially submerged Liverpool, and eventually to Dover, where they must cross the dried-up English Channel on rickety rope-and-ladder bridges. In a sequence that is clearly meant to be nerve-wracking, but thanks to the melodrama and questionable CGI that accompany it, the sequence lands closer to accidental comedy than edge-of-your-seat suspense.

Even with its country-spanning adventure, Greenland 2: Migration mostly sticks to the original’s playbook: with John improvising plans on the fly, danger pops up at regular intervals, and the family somehow surviving each setback intact. The crucial difference this time around is that there’s no ticking clock. Without that sense of urgency, the story drifts from one manufactured hazard to the next, never feeling dangerous, compelling, or emotionally involving. What should have been another harrowing chapter in the Garrity’s journey instead feels tired and strangely inert.

This is genuinely surprising because Ric Roman Waugh returned to direct, but whatever energy or conviction he brought to Greenland has completely vanished here. Writer Chris Sparling, joined this time by Mitchell LaFortune, seems content to cobble together scenes from better post-apocalyptic thrillers rather than craft anything original. Most disappointing is that the cast doesn’t help matters. Butler looks visibly checked out, as if the weight of carrying one too many disposable B-movies has finally taken its toll. Baccarin, once part of the emotional core of the story, is reduced to hovering on the sidelines and alternating between looking worried or scared, and Griffin Davis fares the worst, saddled with painfully clunky dialogue that makes him feel badly miscast.

By the time Greenland 2: Migration finally ends, it’s clear just how unnecessary it all was. The human drama that grounded the original has been replaced with lifeless set pieces and tired plot beats that we’ve seen one too many times. That massive comet may have decimated the planet in the first film, but this sequel obliterates something far more valuable: any reason to care about this franchise.

Greenland 2: Migration is currently playing in wide release.

REVIEW: “Greenland 2: Migration”

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