another bad Gerard Butler disaster movie

If the sort of disaster is to be believed, global cataclysms are nothing less than free couples therapy and family counseling. Why spend all this time trying to fix your marriage or become a better parent for your children when a few days in the face of some annihilation by alien invaders, asteroids or extreme weather conditions will do? Greenland is, in this respect, no different. Damn the pandemic, our annual Gerard Butler film is here, and if Paisley’s favorite son isn’t going to save the President or the planet, he’s at least going to save his family.

To be fair, Butler’s character John Garrity is less of a monomaniac man than the star’s usual scowling saviors employed by the federal government. He’s a structural engineer whose marriage is already on the rocks before, well, real rocks are starting to fall from the sky – interstellar debris from a passing comet. The first is erasing Tampa, and many more to come, including an extinction event-sized “planet killer”. Not knowing that this was going to happen appears to be gross negligence on the part of the scientific community. But who has time to blame someone when the whole world is taking refuge?

Greenlandscript of actually adds an intriguing wrinkle to the pre-apocalyptic rush for safety. Les Garrity – John, his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and their 7One-year-old Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) is gathered in the living room with their neighbors watching the first piece of comet debris enter the atmosphere on television. Something has gone wrong. The car in question did not explode in a light show over the Atlantic Ocean as promised. As reports of destruction start to arrive, an emergency alert goes on John’s – and no one else’s – phone followed by an automated call with instructions to pack a bag and report to a base. from the neighboring air force for an evacuation to unknown parts.

It is clear what is happening. The days are numbered, and very soon CNN will be releasing this 40-year-old tape of the military band playing “Nearer, My God, To Thee”. An apocalyptic back-up plan has just been activated, and John and his family are part of it, unlike their friends and relatives. Except, as the Garrities learn the hard way, their evacuation order was a mistake; they were supposed to have been taken off the list due to Nathan’s diabetes. As to where the apocalypse-proof bunkers might be, it’s a government secret. (It’s Greenland.)

It’s easy to imagine how a better movie could continue this cruel psychological experiment to the end – perhaps even come to an ironic conclusion in which the big planned event will never happen. But it’s a Gerard Butler movie. He responds to her gruff call and the smallest common denominators of a boiler formula: reunite the family, avoid evil strangers, get to safety. At some point you start wishing Butler was playing one of his tough sadists, instead of an approximation of a remorseful man. We’re supposed to feel the violence here, but director Ric Roman Waugh (from last year’s Gerard Butler movie, The angel has fallen), doesn’t seem to have the chops to maintain a sense of tension beyond the nightmarish scenarios of the first act.

Instead, we endure what feels like the extended cut of one of six simultaneous plots in a Roland Emmerich movie, just to be treated with the grand finale of fiery digital gum drops and cheap effects and cheese makers. If a movie is to kill most species in the name of the nuclear family, it should at least do so with some staging and style.