‘The Lost Bus’ review: Paul Greengrass teams with Matthew McConaughey for uneven California wildfire drama

Dir: Paul Greengrass. US. 2025. 130mins

In Paul Greengrass’s heart-pounding survivalist thriller The Misplaced Bus, a significant wildfire breaks out within the hills surrounding Paradise, California and spreads with out mercy. Downtrodden bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) is compelled to vary his route in direction of residence to as an alternative decide up 23 stranded faculty youngsters and their trainer Mary Ludwick (America Ferrera). Greengrass brings intense precision and immersive camerawork to uneasily dramatize a ripped-from-the-headlines story which relies on actual occasions that occurred throughout the wildfires of 2018.

Greengrass doesn’t let you know how one can really feel, he’s virtually screaming at you

The journalist-turned-filmmaker has typically been impressed by tragic reporting, such because the Bogside Bloodbath in Bloody Sunday, a 9/11 hijacking in United 93, the seize of a container vessel by Somali pirates in Captain Phillips, and a mass capturing in Oslo, Norway, in 22 July. However, The Misplaced Bus didn’t originate with Greengrass. Academy Award winner Jamie Lee Curtis first optioned Lizzie Johnson’s 2021 e book Paradise: One City’s Battle to Survive an American Wildfire, bringing Greengrass and co-screenwriter Brad Ingelsby collectively to craft a potent adaptation that world premieres in Toronto. The outcome, which can be heading to Apple TV+ on October 3, might be Greengrass’s most distressing featire and largest industrial swing but.

Earlier than The Misplaced Bus leaps into catastrophe, it first tries to create human stakes. A worn out Kevin is on the finish of his rope: his dad lately handed away; his mom wants residence care; he can also’t appear to choose up sufficient shifts from his finger-wagging supervisor Ruby Bishop (Ashlie Atkinson); his son hates him. As he drives his yellow faculty bus down these huge dusty California streets, he does so with the world on his thoughts. 

The world that surrounds him can also be hurting. On day 210 of a drought, hearth warnings are excessive and the grass is dry. The latter turns into wealthy gasoline when excessive winds trigger defective powerlines managed by the power firm PG&E to tear away, sparking a fireplace that can start in Feather River Canyon earlier than consuming 18,000 buildings and 153,336 acres. 

Earlier than lengthy, Greengrass turns up the depth. Kevin learns that his 15-year-old son Sean (Levi McConaughey, the actor’s actual life son) is sick and his mom needs him again. Because the blaze builds, he should divert his route to choose up the stranded youngsters. Even when he has them on board, it’s not really easy to depart Paradise; Kevin and Mary should navigate by means of street blocks, looters and different lethal obstacles towards security. Earlier than lengthy they grow to be a decent staff akin to Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves in Velocity.   

By no means one to permit the drama to easily breathe, Greengrass and DoP Pål Ulvik Rokseth (Burning Sea) attain for his typical bag of tips: crash zooms to accentuate the exhaustive conferences held by Chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez) and his firefighters, and handheld cameras meant to offer a photojournalistic aesthetic. He additionally consists of precise footage from the travesty, including some fringe of realism to a movie that depends on heavy visible results to create a graphically underwhelming hellscape.   

And whereas the movie is arresting and unnerving, in some ways there’s little or no distinction between The Misplaced Bus and outlandish mainstream catastrophe flicks like Volcano and Dante’s Peak. Greengrass doesn’t let you know how one can really feel, he’s virtually screaming at you, helped alongside by composer James Newton Howard’s heavy-handed rating. He by no means trusts the viewers to easily determine with the scene or characters. Nor does he belief McConaughey to be a surrogate for these feelings. It’s telling that we be taught only a few of the youngsters’s names aside from Toby (Nathan Gariety), who acts an overt avatar for Kevin’s personal damaged relationship along with his son.  

For each second The Misplaced Bus impresses with it scale and craft, there are different cases the place it looks like we’re watching these screaming youngsters be dragged by means of a Disney amusement park experience. And whereas the movie does show some righteous anger, notably at how power corporations are usually not being held accountable for wrecking the surroundings, Greengrass lessens any potential chew in lieu of swooping out and in of flames with popcorn leisure in thoughts.