Paul Greengrass’s treatment of the deadliest fire in California history is old-fashioned in both good and bad ways.
What we have here is, in its larger shape, at least, the sort of disaster film that dragged in crowds during the mid-1970s. A schoolbus, crammed with frightened youngsters, must make its way through the flames while parents fret together in the clean air. We know there will be moments when all looks lost. We know that heroic decency will save the day.
All well and good. Who better than Greengrass, the action maestro behind the Bourne films, United 93 and Captain Phillips, to ramp up the threat and re-create the fist-pumping rescues?
As ever, drawing on his early days as a current-affairs director, he shoots with a kinetic fervour that suggests his cameraman is forever catching up with unexpected circumstances.
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Computers have, of course, been used in the creation of the inferno, but practical effects – real fire with real heat – dominate as the disaster takes on Old Testament proportions. This is propulsive film-making.
Unfortunately, the script is dragged down by wearingly familiar parental issues. Matthew McConaughey turns up as Kevin McKay, a bus driver torn between worries about his mother’s health and concerns that he is falling out with his teenage son.
It is a nice touch to have the actor’s own mom and kid, Kay McCabe McConaughey and Levi McConaughey, play the relatives, but this is just the sort of hackneyed “human interest” that nobody wants to endure when they could be seeing helicopters escape funnels of fire.
Kevin is racing to get flu medicine to the coughing boy when an emergency call comes in to save a bunch of kids – and teacher America Ferrera – facing imminent conflagration. You hardly need to be told how our hero responds to this supposed moral dilemma.
The dull family stuff fades towards the background as we get deeper into a re-creation of the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California.
McConaughey and Ferrera prove the most delightful endangered bus companions since Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Speed, exhibiting just the right balance between tension and comradeship.
The effects are sizzling throughout. Worth catching on its brief theatrical run. Turn it up loud if stuck with the small screen.
The Lost Bus is in cinemas from Monday and on Apple TV+ from Friday, October 3rd
