THE LOST BUS Review: It's Not Alright, Alright

A bus driver and a school teacher shepherd 22 children through a raging wildfire in a movie produced by Jason Blum and Jamie Lee Curtis.

The Lost Bus
The film is now streaming on Apple TV+.

The true story of how Kevin McKay drove a school bus to save 22 children is told as part of Lizzie Johnson's book Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, which recounted events during the deadly Camp Fire in northern California in November 2018, a raging wildfire that soon threatened the nearby town of Paradise, and ended up taking 85 lives.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, whose touch is immediately apparent in the disquieting opening moments of the film, the story is framed by McKay's personal story. On one hand, since a big Hollywood star like Matthew McConaughey is playing the role, it's easy to assume that the part was tailored to him. (Also, McConaughey's son and mother play the character's son and mother.)

Yet even if an unknown actor had played the role, it still makes sense from a dramatic perspective that the driver's personal life frames the events. McConaughey inhabits the role of a modest man who is wracked with guilt when he realizes that his son was not faking being sick in order to skip school, leading to an argument, but was actually in need of assistance. He's also genuinely concerned about his mother, who is limited to a wheelchair.

A relatively new bus driver, Kevin McKay is still getting the hang of his schedule, and struggling to balance his familial responsibilities with his relatively new job, when a call comes in for an empty bus to deliver children from an elementary (primary) school to a meeting point just a few minutes away. McKay volunteers, never realizing that he is embarking on a five-hour journey through hell.

America Ferrera plays Mary Ludwig, a school teacher (and mother) who is pressed into service by McKay to accompany the children for what should have been a short ride. After his argument with his son the previous night, one suspects that he's wary of young children at the moment. (In real life, two teachers accompanied the children, but one declined to be a part of the film.) Once the enormity of the increasingly dangerous trip becomes apparent, it's up to Mary Ludwig to keep the frightened children calm and to trust that a complete stranger will drive them all to safety.

Paul Greengrass, an old hand at this sort of thing (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Captain Phillips), conducts the orchestra with a sure hand, ensuring that the focus remains on "the lost bus," so named because communication in the chaos was soon lost, while convincingly creating an atmosphere that is rife with tension, first as the heroic firefighters battle the rapidly escalating blaze in the wild, and then as Cal Fire Division chief Ray Martinez (Yul Vasquez) makes the call to shift his force's resources to rescuing citizens, rather than fighting a losing battle against the flames.

Watching The Lost Bus is a terrifying experience, tempered only by the knowledge that heroes can be born in flames.