If Gerard Butler had been around in the 1980s, then he probably would have been a megastar given his rugged looks, world-weary charisma and penchant for delivering a solid stream of entertaining action thrillers, but as things stand, his only real rivals when it comes to naming the undisputed king of mid-budget genre cinema are arguably Liam Neeson and Jason Statham, which isn’t a bad place to be at all.
Nine times out of ten, you know exactly what you’re going to get when you see the actor’s name attached to a movie, and in the majority of those cases, he tends to bring the goods. Admittedly, the last time he ventured into disaster territory we got the awful Roland Emmerich knock off Geostorm, but reuniting with Angel Has Fallen director Ric Roman Waugh on Greenland turned out to be a smart move.
The plot hits many of the familiar beats that you’d expect, but it doesn’t opt to show the sort of wide-ranging destruction of famous locations and landmarks that have become passé at this point, instead always keeping the focus on the small family unit at the center of the story, which grounds things as much as possible in an admittedly far-fetched narrative.
After posting a solid showing in theaters (in certain territories, at least) last summer, where it actually managed to turn a profit, Greenland hit VOD in mid-December before recently being added to the Amazon Prime library, where it’s reigned as one of the ten most-watched movies on the platform ever since. Of course, effects-heavy star vehicles have been in painfully short supply over the last twelve months, which is no doubt one of the major reasons why Gerard Butler‘s latest film is performing so well right now.
