Filmmaker Paul Greengrass has struggled to find solid creative footing after the monster successes of his Bourne movies and the real-life siege drama, Captain Phillips, in 2011. It could be said that he’s something of an atrocity chaser when it comes to finding the right subject matter, having made films chronicling the 9⁄11 terror attacks from inside the plane (United 93) and about the victims of the 2011 gun massacre by Anders Behring Breivik (22 July). The Lost Bus in many ways splits the difference, removing some aspects of the moral questionability but also determined to give audiences a sense-battering experience of what it was like to be physically entombed by the 2018 California wildfire.
Matthew McConaughey doesn’t have to flex far as deadbeat dad and school bus driver Kevin McKay in the sleepy berg of Paradise in Butte County, California. Having recently split from his partner (due, what seems, to his own emotional negligence), he has real trouble juggling a complex domestic life with his resentful teenage son (played by McConaughey’s own son, Levi) and incapacitated elderly mother (played by McConaughey’s own mother, Kay). He’s a nice guy with issues and a down-home manner, trying to do his best but never able to make family members or work colleagues happy.
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Cut to a spark on an electricity pylon igniting some grass down below which, with the help of rushing winds, spreads across a small patch of land. There’s no easy access to the spot, so when fire teams are posted out, they can’t actually get close enough to deal with the initial spread. By the time they’ve concocted a plan B and the local fire chief is calling the shots remotely and things have gotten much worse. It’s not long before a full-scale evacuation is sounded and Kevin, meanwhile, is called on for an emergency school run. He grudgingly agrees at the expense of delivering meds to his poorly son.
Soon he has a bus full of nippers and America Ferrara’s cool-headed teacher, Mary Ludwig in tow, but with the fire encroaching on all sides, the options are limited when it comes to escape. While Greengrass is interested in depicting how authorities respond to such an unfathomable incident, The Lost Bus is also calibrated as an old school disaster movie in the vein of The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure. The oppressive sound design and slick effects do add to the experiential mode, and McConaughey and Ferrara make for an appealing odd-couple pairing.
Yet there’s something of a ‘so what?’ aspect to the film where it all comes down to the thrill of potential escape and, eventually, a whole lot of good luck. With this film playing as an Apple TV+ exclusive, it’s hard to imagine that many people will have a home cinema rig that will do justice to an audio bed which so perfectly captures the incessant primal yell of a blazing fire, and without that you‘re left with a decent if hardly original eco-thriller that has too much fun tossing you into a fiery hell to really identify and chide those who are responsible for such calamities.
