★★½ (2½ out of 4)
Director Paul Greengrass knows his way around true-life, tension-filled spectacles. He did it with “United 93,” a 2006 retelling of the September 11, 2001 hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93. He did it in 2013 with “Captain Phillips,” starring Tom Hanks as Captain Richard Phillips, an American merchant mariner who was taken hostage by Somali pirates.
Now the British Greengrass again uses a factual real event to shatter audience nerves in “The Lost Bus,” the story of school bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), who drove 22 school children to safety during the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history.
McConaughey lives and breathes this flawed but heroic school bus driver, but the script jacks up a wow factor that often seems lifted from the Hollywood cliché handbook.
The spectacular effects are best seen in theaters, though “The Lost Bus” will be shuffled off to stream Oct. 3 on Apple TV+ where the claustrophobic trap of the film will be less impactful.
Naysayers have noted that Greengrass sometimes amps up the action at the expense of strict accuracy. They’re not wrong. But this filmmaker, who uses a you-are-there documentary style even in three fictional epics about films about Jason Bourne, insists he stays true to the spirit of what transpired.
You’ll be the judge. But you’ll also see how the script by Greengrass and Brad Ingelsby (“Mare of Eastown,” “Task”), adapted from Lizzie Johnson's book, Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, jacks up the wow factor that often seems lifted from the Hollywood cliché handbook. It’s the actors who ground their behavior in harsh reality.
As ever, the Oscar-winning McConaughey lives and breathes his character. McKay, whose ex-ex-wife (Kimberli Flores) is barely seen, is a caretaker for his disabled mother, Sherry, played by the actor’s real mother, a terrific Kay McConaughey. If you want more verisimilitude, his real son Levi McConaughey plays the role of Shaun McKay, the teen who squabbles with his father over just about everything.
On the day of the fire, Shaun stays home from school claiming an illness that his dad thinks he’s faking. When he’s finished wishing his father dead, Shaun is consumed by a love tinged with toxic resentment that the young McConaughey captures and plays with ferocity and feeling.
That’s the setup when the wildfire, ignited by a faulty electric line, makes its way to McKay’s hometown of Paradise. No one’s too worried at the start when Kevin gets a call from his demanding boss, Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson). It’s a simple job, she says. Take an empty school bus and pick up 22 elementary school students and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), whose school is in the path of the fire. It should take just a few minutes. Five hours later, Kevin, Mary and the kids are still in the beating heart of an inferno.
Greengrass clearly sees Kevin as a modern-day Job; even his dog has cancer. But McConaughey plays it for real, as does Ferrera as the teacher who’s in over her head. They can’t show their panic to the children, but they sure feel it inside.
And so will you as Greengrass stages scenes of such fiery intensity that you’ll duck in your seat as if you’re feeling the heat. As Kevin worries about getting home to his mother and son in time, emergency teams led by fire chief Martinez (a standout Yul Vazquez) fight valiantly to destroy a monster made of flame, and audiences are seeing heroism as it truly looks.
With wildfires now a tragic staple of news broadcasts, “The Lost Bus” is as timely and terrifying as the next blaze heading our way. Greengrass films each scene for maximum terror. The controversy here is whether this filmmaker is right to use horror film techniques to depict a fire that lasted 18 days, killed 85 people and destroyed 18,804 structures in the town of Paradise. Leave your reactions in the comments below.