Starring America Ferrera and Matthew McConaughey, The Lost Bus tells an intimate story of individual courage.The Associated Press
The Lost Bus
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Written by Brad Ingelsby, based on the book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson
Starring Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera and Yul Vazquez
Classification N/A; 130 minutes
Opens in select theatres Sept. 26, streaming on Apple TV+ starting Oct. 3
There is white-knuckle cinema and then there are the clenched-fist films of Paul Greengrass. The British director might be best known for his work on the Jason Bourne franchise, movies which offer their own kind of intensity, but he is also a master storyteller when it comes to ordinary folk caught up in the most awful and traumatic of situations. Captain Phillips, United 73, 22 July, and now The Lost Bus utilize wide-picture geopolitical crises as the canvas to tell small, devastatingly intimate stories of individual courage.
The Lost Bus will debut Sept. 26 and begin streaming on Apple TV+ starting Oct. 3Apple TV+/Supplied
Yet The Lost Bus doesn’t quite measure up to the paths of destruction previously trodden by Greengrass. By unsteadily oscillating between tiny, almost insignificant personal melodrama and gigantic, all-consuming terror, the film (which is also saddled with a terribly off-putting title) struggles to sit inside Greengrass’s typical sweet spot of perfectly calibrated chaos.
Like Captain Phillips and its tremendous showcase for Tom Hanks, The Lost Bus finds its strength in the performance of its lead actor, Matthew McConaughey, who here plays a real-life bus driver named Kevin McKay.
A frazzled, at-his-wits’-ends good ol’ boy who is just trying to do right by his family after enduring years of self-inflicted wounds, McKay fits nicely into McConaughey’s long line of desperate, reluctant heroes. Relatively new to the bus-driving life, one day in November, 2018, McKay is thrust into the middle of a generational crisis, as a wildfire breaks out in Northern California and he alone is charged with ferrying 22 schoolchildren safely through the flames.
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While the scenes in which McKay and schoolteacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) must make split-second life-or-death decisions are appropriately harrowing – with Greengrass embracing the incendiary devastation with an almost Dante-like glee – the film’s most compelling and haunting narrative thread is the one following fire chief Ray Martinez (Yul Vazquez) as he comes up against the realization that all his battalions are, essentially, useless.
Perhaps the Martinez scenes are most effective, though, because they offer audiences a break from the gruelling journey that McKay and Ludwig must power through. How much you might appreciate Greengrass’s inventive mesh of practical and digital flames likely depends on your tolerance for hearing young children scream, “Are we going to die?!?” over and over again.
There is courage, and then there is despair. Too often, you might feel as if Greengrass has his thumb on the more overwrought side of that scale.