The only truly good thing that came out of Greenland 2: Migration is the fact it prompted me to finally watch the first one, which was surprisingly much better than I expected. So, I went into the sequel with pretty high hopes, only for those hopes to get obliterated almost immediately. Greenland 2 feels like a sequel made by people who didn’t really understand why the first film worked, but assumed audiences wanted “more”, because Hollywood has confused bigger with better for so long you’d think they were in Texas. Everything is bigger in Texas, but not in California, and certainly not Greenland.

The original Greenland actually benefited from restraint. It wasn’t trying to be Independence Day. It focused on a family trying to survive, and the apocalypse just happened to be the backdrop. The human element mattered more than spectacle. Greenland 2 abandons that almost instantly, inflating itself into this globe-trotting action movie that never stops moving long enough to justify why any of this exists.

The math behind this sequel is baffling too. The first film reportedly cost around 30 million dollars and made somewhere around 55 million domestically during a pandemic. That’s a success story for a mid-budget disaster film. Somehow, the lesson Hollywood took from that was apparently “triple the budget.” Greenland 2 reportedly ballooned to around 90 million dollars, which is clinically insane. Spending three times as much money does not magically triple the audience. Movies do not function like a vending machine where you put in more budget and receive more box office. Especially not in January.

And honestly, the movie looks expensive in all the wrong ways. It constantly feels the need to escalate itself, but without the emotional grounding the first film had. Gerard Butler returns because of course he does. At this point, Butler wandering through collapsing societies has become its own cinematic subgenre. This time, he has to get his family out of Greenland because, surprise, Greenland didn’t exactly become paradise after the first movie. So now the film becomes about escaping Greenland, which is fascinating considering the movie is still called Greenland. This makes about as much sense as it would be for Independence Day: Resurgence to happen on Valentine’s Day, or for Matthew McConaughey’s Sahara to actually take place in the Mojave desert.

Instead, the family bounces from location to location, including an absurdly long boat trip on a vessel that looks wildly unprepared for the journey. The film keeps trying to recreate the tension of the first movie while forgetting the entire appeal of the original was the singular goal of getting to Greenland in the first place. Now we’ve got a Greenland movie where everyone is desperately trying to leave Greenland. It’s like making Finding Nemo 2 entirely about avoiding fish.

Morena Baccarin returns as well, and somehow winds up involved in a Greenland tribunal despite the film never really explaining why she’d have any authority whatsoever. Gerard Butler’s engineering background also barely matters anymore. The movie basically treats him like he’s secretly ex-military, because apparently every action hero eventually evolves into “generic tactical dad.”

The supporting cast leaves almost no impression, and they even swapped actors playing Butler’s son, which certainly doesn’t help the continuity. Nobody new here really sticks. The film just keeps sprinting from one sequence to another with this frantic run-and-gun pacing that never allows anything to breathe.

Ironically, the audio description was probably one of the stronger aspects of the experience. Considering how chaotic and hyperactive the filmmaking is, the track at least managed to keep up with everything flying around onscreen. The first Greenland was surprisingly effective because it stayed relatively small, focused, and human. Greenland 2: Migration is confused, bloated, and completely unsure why audiences connected with the original film in the first place. It mistakes escalation for storytelling, and bigger budgets for audience demand.

Watch the first Greenland. Skip this one. There probably won’t be a third film anyway, because somehow they spent significantly more money only to make significantly less. Or, to put it in terms Gerard Butler can understand Greenland Has Fallen.

Rotten: 4.8/10