The disaster movie meets true life drama in The Lost Bus, the latest in director Paul Greengrass's growing line of cinematic recreations of headline news incidents. This one is inspired by a story of heroism that emerged from the 2018 California "Camp Fire," the deadliest fire in the state's history, which claimed 85 lives and left tens of thousands of residents displaced. The fire began in the morning when a faulty transmission tower released a live electrical cable whose sparks ignited the dry grass below. Within hours the authorities had declared a mass casualty event.
The casualties may have been even greater were it not for the heroism of a bus driver named Kevin McKay, who filled his bus with stranded schoolkids and their teacher, shepherding them to safety through a raging inferno.
The fictionalised version of McKay is played here by Matthew McConaughey as a troubled man seeking redemption. We don't really need to know about McKay's life for us to root for him to make it through the fire, but screenwriter Brad Inglesby insists on painting him as a loser, which makes you wonder how the real life McKay feels about this portrayal. Here, McKay has returned to his home town in Butte County following the death of his estranged father. Now living with his ailing, wheelchair-bound mother and a teenage son who hates his guts, McKay has taken a job driving a school bus, but his abrasive ways and lack of reliability are threatening his chances of holding onto the job. Just in case we didn't realise what a low point McKay has reached, the film forces him to put the dog he's owned since a puppy to sleep.
Over a quarter of this two hour movie is devoted to establishing McKay as a sad sack, but while such a portrayal seems unnecessary it also allows Greengrass to build up the tension, contrasting the growing panic among the county's firefighters with the oblivious McKay's personal issues. By the time he receives the plea to pick up a class full of kids from a nearby school, McKay figures he has nothing to lose.
Once the kids are on board, The Lost Bus begins to resemble a classic disaster movie, the type that filled cinemas in the '70s and saw an over the top revival in the '90s. He may be at the wheel of a school bus rather than a jumbo jet, but McKay is essentially the pilot from every instalment of the Airport series, and his need for redemption is so desperate he comes awfully close to Ted Striker, the parody of such figures played by Robert Hays in the Zucker Brothers Airplane!. As schoolteacher Mary Ludwig, America Ferrera is cast in the role of the flight attendant who helps the pilot land his damaged plane. The screaming tots will remind viewers of those kidnapped by Scorpio in the climax of Dirty Harry.
But Greengrass's propulsive filmmaking ensures we're never given time to think about how hacky a script he's working with. Once McKay gets the last child on board and puts pedal to the metal even the most cynical of viewer will be taking deep breaths. Greengrass and his team have created a terrifying vision of suburbia turned into a boiling hellscape. For a long time fire, much like water, was notoriously difficult to recreate digitally, but here you always feel like McConaughey and his passengers are genuinely surrounded by flames. Like Sam Raimi's personification of a wandering possessive spirit in The Evil Dead, Greengrass conveys the all-consuming fury of the fire with digital drone shots that fly through his ravaged landscape like the POV of some hellish harpy. Whenever he cuts back to the authorities on the outskirts of the fire, we're shocked to be reminded it's still daylight, as the fire has turned the sky a charcoal black within the danger zone (Greengrass previously did a similar trick with The Bourne Supremacy when a character emerged from a nightclub into the brightness of a Moscow afternoon).
McKay's fictional backstory is largely needless as McConaughey is a good enough actor to convey his character's state of mind without crudely written speeches from ex-wives about what a loser he is. Some of the movie's most tense moments see McConaughey silently wrestling with decisions in his mind, aware that one bad choice could spell the deaths of the children in his hands. Initially questioning McKay's choices, Ludwig becomes the voice of support he badly needs in that moment, and Ferrara brings a maternal warmth to the role. Elsewhere Greengrass continues his streak of casting just the right faces in supporting roles, with Kate Wharton, Yul Vazquez and Danny McCarthy bringing a convincing reality to their increasingly stressed firefighters. If only it leaned more heavily on Greengrass's vérité verisimilitude and less on Inglesby's screenwriting 101 shtick, The Lost Bus might be one of the all-time great survival thrillers.
Directed by: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Danny McCarthy, Kate Wharton, Ashlie Atkinson, Yul Vazquez
