Gerard Butler returns to keep his family safe from post-apocalyptic chaos in a glum and misjudged follow-up to the superior 2020 adventure

Gerard Butler has made his fair share of sequels, but few have held as much potential as Greenland 2: Migration. The original Greenland wasn’t even a traditional hit; it was released in theaters and on VOD at the end of 2020, when plenty of cinemas remained closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it garnered some attention for being an unusually sober and thoughtful apocalypse movie, especially given that Butler previously starred in the likes of Geostorm. Because Greenland was about surviving a global apocalypse rather than averting one, any sequel would have to venture into the unknown with a drastically different status quo.

Greenland 2 obliges for a little while, though it also walks back some of the hope that ended the first film. The story rejoins engineer John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his administrator wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and their now-teenage son Nathan (recast as Roman Griffin Davis) as residents of a Greenland bunker. They’re lucky to have been government-selected for entry when the Earth was rendered largely uninhabitable by comet fragments five years earlier; they’re also chafing at the loss of freedom, tough decisions and overall claustrophobia that comes with cohabitating underground with hundreds of others. (Curiously, none of them seem to have made many friends despite the close quarters.)

Chalamet’s nogoodnik ping-pong hustler character is the latest in cinema’s rich history of protagonists with shabby morals. So why the backlash?

In the new hit movie Marty Supreme, the story is pushed forward by how lead character Marty Mauser keeps making messes then, rather than cleaning them up, manages to expand their scope beyond reason. Marty is attempting to prove himself as the world’s greatest table-tennis champion, to escape his meagre mid-century New York City circumstances and achieve a dream he’s locked on to, seemingly more out of desire to achieve it than a particular love for the sport.

And just as he’s presumably blown up some natural athleticism into a monomaniacal quest, all of Marty’s misdeeds across the film escalate. He cajoles, then lies. He quickly turns a pushy request to borrow money into petty theft, which then becomes armed robbery. At one point, a little ping-pong hustle at a New Jersey bowling alley literally blows up into a gas-station fire. Marty will not accept anything less than ultimate victory, which means he will especially not accept responsibility for his actions. And we, in the audience, are invited to like him anyway, at least in part because he is played by Timothée Chalamet.