10 Recent Movies With One AWFUL Subplot
3. The Son Gets Kidnapped - Greenland
The Gerard Butler-starring disaster flick Greenland was ultimately one of 2020's most surprisingly entertaining films - a modest stab at the genre which focuses less on CGI-soaked carnage and more on the desperation of a family to merely survive.
This is all well and good, though the 119-minute movie ends up padding itself out with one delineated side-story too many, when John (Butler) and Allison's (Morena Baccarin) young son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) gets freaking kidnapped.
Because the prospect of an incoming planet-annihilating comet isn't enough for one movie, there's a subplot where the family are picked up by a couple, Ralph and Judy Vento (David Denman and Hope Davis), who are desperate to get on one of the evacuating flights to Greenland.
As such, they end up kidnapping Nathan in the hope that they can use him to board one of the flights - an optimistic-at-best plan which, of course, doesn't work.
Clearly, there's a drum-tight 100-minute movie to be found here, but the utter silly nonsense of this subplot bloats the film out totally unnecessarily.