Stream It Or Skip It?

The Lost Bus (now streaming on Apple TV+) finds director Paul Greengrass shaky-camming his way through a rigorously intense BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie – again. The filmmaker behind United 93 and Captain Phillips Hollywoodifies a real-life story within the horrible blaze of the 2018 Camp Fire, which decimated the city of Paradise, California and took 85 lives. Matthew McConaughey plays Kevin McKay, a school bus driver who navigated the apocalyptic blaze with 22 elementary-school kids on board, and America Ferrara co-stars as the teacher trying to keep the kids cool and calm. I found the film rather engrossing in its you-are-there immediacy, which is one of Greengrass’ specialties – but it also had me wondering why the director opted for POV shots of the fire itself, which zooms through the tinder forest like a Sam Raimi Evil Dead cam. Call me distracted.

The Gist: Every wind gale, every creak from an electrical tower, every rustle of leaves in a parched woods is fraught with tension. The only thing that could break it is the rumble of thunder, but this area of Northern California hasn’t had a drop of rain in 210 days. Against this backdrop, Kevin (McConaughey) barely holds on to the bus-driver job he’s had for a scant 30 days. School transportation boss Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson) is patient but firm, although he’s been loosey-goosey on the gig enough that she doesn’t want to hear about his woes – his recently deceased father, his divorce, his angry 14-year-old son, his ailing mother, his pile of unpaid bills, his reluctant return to Paradise after escaping the ties that bind decades prior. Does Kevin get any solace at all? Nope. He goes home to his wheelchair-bound mother (Kay McCabe McConaughey, the actor’s real-life mother), a kid (Levi McConaughey, his real-life offspring) who spits “I wish you were dead” and a cancer-ridden dog who he takes to the vet for euthanization. He’s a raw nerve in the oversmoked beef jerky of McConaughey’s endearingly weathered shell. (I guess it makes sense that Kevin looks markedly older than his 44 years, since McConaughey is 54.)

“I can’t seem to catch a break” is Kevin’s lament. He drops off the morning haul of children and tries to pick up medicine for his ailing boy but Ruby is on his ass to do his job and get the bus back here ASAP. He’s already tense and sweaty and fielding calls from his mother and his ex-wife as the smoke blooms on the horizon. The doom-cam captures the moment when a Pacific Gas and Electric tower snaps and drops a live wire on the forest floor, with instant ignition. The wind howls and flames spread and reports are made and first responders hustle and assess and pull out maps and track the fire and bark orders and make difficult decisions from the cockpits of fire trucks and parking lots and fraught and bustling interior headquarters. Kevin eyes the growing fire as he navigates traffic and tries to call his son who doesn’t answer and gets reamed by his ex and dashes into a pharmacy and answers Ruby on the radio that yes, he’s on his way back, and yes, he’s 20 minutes out, and yes, he’ll have the bus back for its scheduled maintenance.

But Ruby’s next call is for any driver who’s listening: The bustling officials have ordered an evacuation. There’s one school with a classroom full of children that needs to be transported from the danger zone to the safety zone and to the arms of their worried parents. All the other buses are full but Kevin’s is empty and he just wants to bring the medicine to his son and check on his mother and get them out of there. He hesitates. One beat. Two. On the third he replies: He’ll pick up the kids. Miss Mary (Ferrara) patiently lines up the children and has them pull up their hoods and hold hands while Kevin’s every jitter and glance says hurry it up we haven’t got all day. She needs to stay calm for the kids’ sake while he was fried even before spark turned to flame. Kevin navigates traffic jams, argues with Mary (“Screw your plan, teach!” he snaps), maneuvers through shortcuts, takes calculated risks, dodges falling live power lines, avoids pistol-toting looters, dodges a bulldozer, kickstarts the engine when it won’t start at the least opportune moment – and pauses for a temporary moment of broiling eye-of-the-storm solace to share his numerous aches with Mary, and she with him. Ordinary people, extraordinary circumstances.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Spielberg’s aerial-firefighting misfire Always comes to mind, as does Angelina Jolie-starring firefighter drama Those Who Wish Me Dead (and, unfortunately, John Cena comedy Playing with Fire). Multiple documentaries about Paradise have also been produced, including Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise; I can vouch for Netflix’s insightful and harrowing short doc Fire in Paradise. 

Performance Worth Watching: This is McConaughey’s first on-screen performance since 2019, and it’s rock-solid, credible and admirable performance that nicely fits within the parameters of a standard mainstream BOATS thriller.

Memorable Dialogue: At a press conference, Cal Fire Chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez) brushes up against the thing nobody seems to want to mention: “Every year the fires get bigger,and there’s more of them.” Pause. “We’re being damn fools, and that’s the truth.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I say this as someone who vehemently defended Greengrass’ breathless chaos-cam in the Bourne films: Aren’t we over this hectic, frantic, disorienting visual style by now? Certainly, the handheld quick-zoom wobble-and-glide communicates the sense of jittery anxiety dictated by the situation. It’s life or death. We get it. But The Lost Bus rarely gives us a moment of peace, even before the fire starts, the camera twitching as the film establishes its setting and characters. Even as the world kills off poor Kevin’s poor dog in the opening scenes – a development that tells us this guy can’t get any lower without being encoffined – the camera is restless and we’re already feeling exhausted by the constant movement.

But I’m also torn, because Greengrass’ stomp-on-the-gas method is highly effective in capturing the brutal intensity of the situation. He does justice to the real-life story and its people by taking their pain and stress and trauma seriously; The Lost Bus reaffirms what his previous films asserted, that the director hasn’t a glib bone in his body. That translates to McConaughey and Ferrara, whose raw emotional performances eclipse the unnecessary cliches of their character, as if the angst of their work and family lives motivates them to keep 22 children from being consumed by angry flames. Isn’t the mere fact that angry flames want to consume 22 children enough to motivate the average person to be selfless and heroic?

The film’s sheer propulsiveness kept me thoroughly engrossed in the survival drama – there’s never a dull moment – while at the same time I was aware of the numerous cliches Greengrass’ and Brad Ingelsby’s script indulges. The director’s nurturing of darkness-at-noon claustrophobia 

as the smoke and flames encroach is highly effective despite the obvious use of CGI (which has me lamenting that, despite such spectacle, a streaming release is ideal, because the visual flaws would become more apparent on a bigger screen), and the Raimi-cam, which moves like it’s operated by Xbox controller, feels silly, turning a natural force into something that feels consciously evil. 

Some viewers may be disappointed that the film is too busy addressing the immediacy of survival to give us a big-picture statement as to why, as the above quotable moment asserts, wildfires are increasingly prevalent and historically destructive in recent years. The politicization of climate change is the culprit; The Lost Bus clearly wants to avoid alienating anyone, so it avoids what should be universal and sticks with what we all can agree on: Nobody wants to see a busful of children die. Admittedly, that’s Greengrass’ strength. He’s exceedingly skilled at telling survival stories. He keeps it simple, even if it’s sometimes stupid.

Our Call: My analytical brain doesn’t love The Lost Bus, or even merely like it sometimes. But my reptile brain insists it’s the target audience, so I’ll give it voice right here: STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.