‘The Lost Bus’ movie review: Matthew McConaughey steers Paul Greengrass’s white-knuckle ride

Paul Greengrass elevates genre films to works of anxiety-inducing art. The British director took the spy thriller to a different level with 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum. He injects non-fiction with imagination and adrenaline to create white-knuckle rides, as is obvious in his retelling of the fate of one of the four planes hijacked in the 9/11 attacks in United 93 (2006), life in Baghdad’s Green Zone in the eponymous 2010 film, or the 2009 Maersk Alabama hijacking in 2013’s Captain Phillips.

For The Lost Bus, Greengrass turns his queasy-cam (the camera swoops and swirls with a life of its own) on the 2018 Camp Fire in California which resulted in the death of 85 people, displacement of over 50,000, and destruction of 19,336 buildings.

Greengrass wrote the screenplay with Brad Ingelsby, based on Lizzie Johnson’s Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire. The movie is produced by Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions, mainly known for its horror films. In The Lost Bus, however, the horror is not from killer robots or masked murderers but from poor maintenance of gas lines and the refusal to listen to Mother Nature’s warnings. As Fire Chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez) says at a press briefing in the film, “Every year the fires get bigger, and there’s more of them.”

We watch the drama unfold from two viewpoints. There is the institutional — the fire and other emergency services, as they struggled and failed to get on top of the raging fire, from the first call on the morning of November 8, 2018, reporting the fire, to the decision to cease firefighting efforts and concentrate on saving lives.

Kevin (Matthew McConaughey) presents the personal viewpoint. A struggling father, Kevin, returns to his hometown, Paradise, when his father passes away, to care for his mother, Sherry (Kay McCabe McConaughey). Kevin has a fractious relationship with his son, Shaun (Levi McConaughey), echoing Kevin’s difficult relationship with his father, whom he had not spoken to after leaving home on Christmas Eve at the age of 16 following a shouting match.

Now at 44, with a broken marriage and deadbeat job driving the school bus, Kevin has returned home, overwhelmed by life’s slings and arrows. Incidentally, The Lost Bus boasts three generations of McConaugheys in its cast, with McConaughey’s real-life mother and son playing their reel-life counterparts.

When Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson), the bus depot dispatcher, asks if there are any empty buses on the road to pick up 22 children whose parents have not been able to collect them from Ponderosa Elementary, Kevin thinks life is offering him a chance to make good on his bad choices. As he later ruefully comments to Mary (America Ferrera), the school teacher accompanying the children on the bus, “Second chances don’t all work out that way.”

A still from ‘The Lost Bus’
| Photo Credit:
Apple TV+

Using real fire and CGI, Greengrass succeeds in his wish to show the fire as voracious as the great white in Jaws (are we getting that IMAX re-release celebrating 50 years of Jaws in India?). The long shots of the bus trapped in a ring of menacing, ravenous flames are terrifying, making the relief all the greater when Kevin finally breaks through the ring of flames and darkness to a serene daylight.

McConaughey has buried his golden surfer good looks in ash and grime to become Kevin, while Ferrera imbues her clichéd school teacher character with warmth and courage. The Lost Bus is a thrilling, terrifying ride from the heart of climate change and negligence, into the light of a sliver of salvation.

The Lost Bus is currently streaming on Apple TV+