I kept hearing from various people about how pleasantly surprised they were by Amazon original “Greenland.” The disaster movie has a family fighting for survival as a planet-killing comet is about to crash to Earth. Atlanta residents, John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and young son Nathan have just 48 hours to find a secret government sanctuary in Greenland that has an underground shelter. The world is in chaos as some cities have already been leveled by the comet’s fragments. Tampa, a city of 400,000 people, has been wiped off the map. What ensues are chaotic crowd scenes and then Garrity’s bout with the worst of humanity. It’s like “War of the Worlds, but the aliens are replaced by flying debris from space. Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, “Greenland” isn’t as silly as Waugh’s other Gerard Butler-starring apocalyptic thriller, “Geostorm.” Here, the actor/director team creates tenser sequences, aided by cerebrally-shot action. As a mild diversion, “Greenland” works well, until it doesn’t. For the first 90 minutes, we’re there in this family’s quest for shelter as they scramble to reunite whenever they get separated. Too bad then that Waugh’s film sometimes feels like too much, especially in the final act, when the personal is replaced by the plodding.
SCORE: C+