Paul Greengrass hasn’t had a bona fide box office hit in quite some time, but the good work marches on: he continues to churn out perfectly serviceable, politically-inflected action movies like clockwork. The Lost Bus is no different from his previous output, implementing his by-now trademark faux-documentary style — so widely copped, it ought to earn him a commission — to bring us “the most realistic depiction of fire ever on film,” a superlative which oversells it considerably. Most enthusiastic depiction of fire ever on film would be more apt, and just as good a reason — if not better — to check out this fun, if painfully overlong, minor key natural disaster movie.
It’s nice to see Matthew McConaughey take a break from hawking self-help books to do what he’s good at: playing a gruff, grizzled man behind the wheel of a large automobile. In The Lost Bus, this grizzled man is Kevin, a down-on-his luck deadbeat dad new to the bus driving game. One day, a downed powerline sparks a raging complex fire near Paradise, California. Kevin, stuck on the wrong side of town as the fire closes in, makes the courageous decision to extricate a group of students and their no-nonsense teacher Mary on his way back to the bus depot.
Yet Greengrass takes his sweet time getting to the fireworks. At first, the cross-cutting between firefighters failing to contain a fast-spreading fire and Kevin struggling to get through his day lends the movie a sense of urgency, but Greengrass gets distracted by process too easily. He spends too much time with the firefighters when we should be with Kevin and the kids, who aren’t even picked up until 40 minutes in. Greengrass aims too narrowly for verisimilitude: stammering performances and tough, real-looking faces fill the frame — particular note should go to Ashlie Atkinson, who’s great as the bus depot manager Ruby — but Greengrass’s obsession with competency porn gets in the way of a cleaner, more thrilling narrative throughline.
There’s also some fairly stodgy dialogue from co-writer Brad Ingelsby, creator of the decidedly well-written miniseries Mare of Easttown, pulling The Lost Bus down. More often than they should, which is never, Ingelsby and Greengrass resort to groan-worthy streamer-brained lines: characters stating exactly what just happened on screen or engaging in contrived banter so you can follow along while you fold your laundry. “You can’t go down that road, it’s on fire!” one evacuee shouts at the bus. “Not so bad yourself,” Mary shoots back at Kevin after he compliments her for helping him solve a Tetris-like traffic problem. “I’ll go see if anyone is there,” she says later when the school they were originally supposed to rally at is obviously engulfed in flames and empty. Or, the best of the bunch: “don’t go that way,” rendered by an off-the-cuff McConaughey as “do not go thataway.” Greengrass and Ingelsby likewise fail to elevate the proceedings by shoehorning in a lazy father-son redemption subplot that barely lifts off and never properly lands.
But we don’t watch Wildfire: The Ride for Lonerganian dialogue and family drama, do we? We watch to see death-defying, fire-escaping action, at which Greengrass is quite adept when the rubber hits the road more than an hour in: there’s some truly hellacious, apocalyptic inferno imagery here. When the camera hovers over the fire, it’s like a wild animal; we are the fire. And Greengrass knows how to utilize a zoom to a narrative end. There’s a snap zoom at the aforementioned burning school: Kevin is bummed that nobody’s there, and Greengrass zooms out, quickly, as Kevin gets up from putting his hands on his knees, newly determined to save these kids — it’s a beautiful little character flourish. Sometimes there’s a little poetry when Greengrass withholds a cut, like when a man catches fire, and another jumps on him with a huge blanket to put it out, this while a woman gets out of her car, screaming — all in one shot. But just as he starts gathering momentum, Greengrass screeches the bus to a halt to let his leads chitchat about second chances. If there was ever any chance his point-A-to-point-B driving movie would match the white-knuckle intensity of antecedents like The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer, by the end of act two it’s entirely up in smoke.
There are, however moments of grace throughout. Kevin is good with kids; people come together to comfort one another and offer helping hands; a firefighter, dwarfed by flame, stands resolute on a ridge in spite of the unlikelihood of containing the conflagration. In an era when disasters — natural and otherwise — appear to be around every corner, a movie like The Lost Bus might seem kind of useless. But Greengrass makes a compelling case for dramatizing them, when he gets around to it: they demonstrate the possibility of resilience.
DIRECTOR: Paul Greengrass; CAST: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez, Ashlie Atkinson; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple Original Films; IN THEATERS: September 19; STREAMING: October 3; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 9 min.
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