It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Paul Greengrass, the English director who specializes primarily in chronicling real-life disasters and Matt Damon-related global turmoil.
After adapting some non-Jason Bourne fiction in 2020 with the contemplative Western News of the World, it’s easy to imagine Greengrass taking the past five years to scour the globe for horrifying big-canvas events to dramatize, absolutely spoiled for choice. He’s landed on The Lost Bus, which takes place during the 2018 Camp Fire in California—the deadliest in the state’s history.
“During” might not do justice to just how deep into the wildfire The Lost Bus goes.
At first, the movie follows Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a down-on-his-luck single dad who has returned to his hometown to care for his own aging mother. Kevin has found employment as a school bus driver, but he’s desperate for overtime shifts even as he struggles to handle the hours he’s already given.
Life (or a screenplay) is just piling it on this guy: Within about half an hour, we see him get into an argument with his teenage son that quickly turns ugly; run afoul of his weary dispatcher/boss (Ashlie Atkinson); realize the aforementioned son is suffering from stomach flu; and, perhaps most excessive, put his beloved, cancer-ridden dog to sleep.
That’s all before the wildfire breaks out, whereupon he volunteers to pick up a group of stranded elementary-school kids. It’s getting them to safety that proves harrowingly difficult, as the streets are blocked by traffic, smoke, and the fire itself, all understandably ratcheting up the panic levels.
The bus story is just one of many from Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, a non-fiction account of the Camp Fire that inspired this movie’s screenplay. There are hints of that broader picture when Greengrass cuts to various officials and firefighters strategizing about how they might contain the fast-spreading blaze. The man loves control rooms, and their attendant opportunities for handheld close-ups of barely-characterized people on headsets.
In this case, it’s the relatively quotidian details of the school district transportation office that oddly proves most compelling, perhaps because it’s so specific—and because Atkinson gives such a grounded and utterly believable performance as the dispatcher. The other control-room business feels pretty generic, even for Greengrass; it’s procedural connective tissue that attempts to concisely explain how the fire spread so disastrously. It does the job, but little else.
For that matter, McConaughey, while still a reliable audience anchor, has to shoulder a lot of generic material, too. Kevin’s hard-luck story often plays like a laughably unnecessary bid for sympathy, given that he has a built-in Save the Cat moment free of screenwriting cheese. Kevin drives off to rescue a bunch of kids and he’s played by Matthew McConaughey; do we really need to spend some time feeling bad about his sickly dog as a warm-up?
Once the bus gets moving, with teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) along to help manage the kids, Greengrass mounts as impressive a disaster-movie spectacle as any recent example of the genre. (Perversely, most viewers will see these horrors shrunk down to TV size, as Apple is only giving the movie a small, cursory theatrical release beginning Sept. 19, prior to its streaming debut on Oct. 3.)
The visual effects simulating the journey through smoky roads and eventually forests, dotted with fires and dark as night despite unfolding in broad daylight, are often seamlessly immersive. The tension sustains even if you happen to know the ending.
Yet as with some other Greengrass pictures, The Lost Bus also doesn’t add up to more than its good-faith, non-exploitative spectacle. A postscript with McConaughey’s Kevin searches for the sustained emotional impact of Tom Hanks finally allowing himself to break down at the end of Captain Phillips, and doesn’t locate anything even close to that raw-nerve stunner of a scene. None of the movie does; it has some pulse-quickening suspense and heartbreaking moments of potential bleakness appended to a high-toned version of the children’s book series I Survived.
Rather than being moved by the everyday heroism or called to action by the environmental devastation, you’re left relieved that at least Mark Wahlberg didn’t get his hands on this one.
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