{"id":175961,"date":"2025-10-02T21:04:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T21:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/175961\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T21:04:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T21:04:13","slug":"the-lost-bus-review-matthew-mcconaughey-in-a-real-life-horror-story-warped-by-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/175961\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Bus review \u2013 Matthew McConaughey in a real-life horror story warped by Hollywood"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Paul Greengrass, journalist-turned-director, has spent a lifetime navigating the space between truth and cinema<\/a>. When he turned his hand at the Bourne series<\/a> \u2013 for Supremacy (2004), Ultimatum (2007), and Jason Bourne (2016) \u2013 he lent them all their bare-knuckled weight and credibility; yet with every recreation of true-life tragedy he\u2019s made, from Captain Phillips (2013) to 22 July (2018), we\u2019re sucked back into the same conversation. At what point does the commitment to immersion, to the hope of startling an audience with the force of living history, teeter into pure exploitation?<\/p>\n

His latest, The Lost Bus, does little to answer that question. The film has an urgent drive to its depiction of the 2018 Camp Fire<\/a> that swept northern California\u2019s Butte County, the deadliest in the state\u2019s history. It\u2019s not only a vivid reminder of where wilful inaction in the face of climate change has left us, but of where the blame lies in this particular instance \u2013 PG&E, or the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, whose poor maintenance of its power lines caused the initial spark.<\/p>\n

Matthew McConaughey plays bus driver Kevin McKay, who saved 22 stranded primary school students from the town of Paradise (and, yes, the film is practically salivating over the irony there) by navigating a 30-mile, five-hour odyssey to break free of the smoke and flames. America Ferrera plays Mary Ludwig, one of the two teachers on the bus (the second declined to be included in the film) who soothed these terrified kids and kept alive their hope.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, Greengrass depicts the wild, unpredictable path of the fire with a frightening intensity. There\u2019s no time to think in these situations. All you can do is run. Cars ram into each other. A man engulfed by flames is tackled to the ground with a blanket. Desperate locals wade into the creek, knowing they\u2019ve lost their chance to escape. Cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth\u2019s swooping shots from the fire\u2019s perspective, as it licks up dried grass, sit on the border of gimmicky. But with Greengrass elsewhere relying heavily on practical effects, the cumulative effect is still harrowing. It really is like watching the opening of the mouth of hell.<\/p>\n

\"AmericaAmerica Ferrera and Matthew McConaughey in \u2018The Lost Bus\u2019 (Apple TV+)<\/p>\n

Yet here\u2019s where all that sober cin\u00e9ma-v\u00e9rit\u00e9 slips into the Backdraft\/Towering Inferno\/pure Hollywood realm of disaster cinema: Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby have taken Kevin\u2019s real-life circumstances (quite inspiring on paper: he was a longtime Walgreens employee who quit to pursue an education degree, driving buses on the side) and tossed it out in favour of a near-farcical amount of misery. That, in turn, lets them pull off a redemption story where McConaughey eschews his Hollywood glitz for a scraggly beard and tattoos.<\/p>\n

This Kevin, as he mutters to himself, \u201ccan\u2019t seem to catch a break\u201d. He\u2019s back, tail between his legs, from a failed attempt to \u201cmake it\u201d in Reno, with an ailing mother (Kay McCabe McConaughey), a bitter ex-wife, and a son who hates him (Levi McConaughey; that these characters are played by the actor\u2019s actual son and mother makes no tangible difference). The dispatcher (Ashlie Atkinson) won\u2019t give him any extra shifts. His dog has terminal cancer. So, McConaughey squeezes out a few of those trademark, racked sobs of his \u2013 and, certainly, he\u2019s at least well positioned to offer the character his twitchy rawness, contrasted nicely with Ferrera\u2019s strength and reassurance.<\/p>\n

All that bad luck only intensifies once the disaster starts, so that we reach the point where a looter, waving around his gun, is yelling \u201cGive us the bus!\u201d like he\u2019s one of Al Capone\u2019s minions. The Lost Bus traps us in that disorientating push and pull \u2013 it\u2019s a little too real to entertain, and a little too entertaining to feel real.<\/p>\n

Dir: Paul Greengrass. Starring: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez, Ashlie Atkinson. Cert 15, 130 minutes.<\/p>\n

\u2018The Lost Bus\u2019 streams on Apple TV+ from 3 October<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-175961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}