The Lost Bus

With a script by Brad Ingelsby (Mare of Easttown, HBO's Task), direction by Paul Greengrass (Captain Philips, Green Zone, The Bourne Supremacy) and a lead performance by Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey (who took the Golden Globe for his role in Dallas Buyers Club), it feels like a thriller about a super-lethal, massive wildfire could be nothing short of genuinely superb with these three. Northern California's devastating 2018 fire claimed 85 lives and destroyed nearly 13,000 (!) homes. In the midst of this aggressive wall of fire moving in historic fast from Sacramento down to Ridgewood, a school bus was stuck, wedged between fire trucks and panicked road users trying to escape certain death from Paradise, California. On board the school bus was a class of 24 terrified children, their teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) and bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey).

The true story of perhaps the world's greatest bus driver of all time, who through heroic efforts became the most talked about person throughout the firefighting that took place for many long weeks there, in the summer of 2018. That Kevin's effort would be made into a film was clear over six years ago, but it is only now that Greengrass has managed to cobble together his dream project, which in many ways is reminiscent of Captain Philips (another Greengrass film based on real heroism, which starts slowly and then gradually increases the pace towards a hell of a crescendo). It's a bit sad, though, that this was neither particularly exciting, gripping nor memorable.

The main problem here for me is that it lacks clarity. Greengrass's patented super-shaky handheld camerawork often messes up key scenes where I, as a viewer, can't actually discern what he's trying to show, and Ingelsby's script lacks the elegance of dialogue that he usually crams in along with the relatable, human darkness that his best work also offers (Out of the Furnace, is a shining example, of this). Matthew McConaughey plays a cobbled-together one-dimensional character who is hard to like and root for, while even America Ferrera's schoolmarm tends to feel flat, script-wise. There are a couple of properly lavish scenes towards the end where the bus, like a bright yellow, smoke-damaged missile, penetrates the huge flames that devastated half of Paradise, but the size of the fire, the deaths and the scale are never really there, so the small scale kills some of the tension that requires us as viewers to know more about the actual stakes (apart from the children, of course - who we don't get to know either). It's never bad but never very good either. Missed potential from a real film-dream team, I would say.