Picking up five years after the events of the first film, John Garrity (Butler), along with his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and now-teenaged son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis), are still living with other survivors at the Greenland bunker complex. There, they wait for conditions to improve so that they can return to the surface. Alas, they have already stayed down there three years longer than expected, and with supplies growing scarce, things are getting a little tense as everyone continues to live through this new normal. Before too long, increasingly severe tremors cause the entire complex to collapse, with John and his family among those lucky enough to escape via lifeboat. A scientist among them (Amber Rose Revah) theorizes that the biggest crater left by one of Clarke’s fragments, located in the south of France, might actually contain both the basic necessities for life and provide protection from the radiation storms that are constantly flaring up at a moment’s notice.

At this point, the film essentially becomes “Greenland’s European Apocalypse,” as the Garritys and a quickly-dwindling group of survivors struggle to make their way to the site of the crater in the hopes that the rumors are true. Along the way, they encounter trigger-happy troops in Liverpool protecting a bunker from those stuck outside, drive across a now-empty English Channel, and struggle to cross a gaping chasm using a rope bridge so rickety that it makes the bridge in “Sorcerer” seem like a model of stability. And don’t forget the people who are still willing to kill for the few remaining scraps of civilization. On the other hand, they encounter a French family who take them in for the night and then insist that the Garritys take their surprisingly salon-perfect teenage daughter Camille (Nelia Valero de Costa) along with them. At least from Nathan’s perspective, there is a bright side to this apocalypse after all.

The problem is that the human drama that made the original “Greenland” at least somewhat compelling is almost entirely absent here. Instead, Waugh and screenwriters Mitchell LaFortune and Chris Sparling have essentially cobbled together elements seemingly taken directly from the likes of “Children of Men,” “The Walking Dead,” “The Road” and the “28 Days/Weeks/Years” films, giving the proceedings an all-too-familiar feeling that grows tedious after a while. The interfamilial strife amongst the Garritys that gave the first film a little juice is gone, rendering them little more than blandly heroic. There is one attempt to introduce real drama between them that never quite hits the hoped-for mark. In Hero’s Journey terms, the family survives the ordeal, but the deeper inner transformation never really arrives. At the same time, new characters are barely introduced before being violently dispatched. Even the big-scale moments of destruction that peppered the first film are mostly kept to a minimum here, though the occasional tackiness of the special effects suggests that this might not have been such a loss after all.