California wildfires are as common as bottles of baby oil at a Diddy party and one of the largest, costliest, and deadliest was the 2018 Camp Fire where 85 people died, nearly $17 billion in damage was done, over 55,000 people were displaced as several towns and cities were burned to the ground. In the midst of this rapidly spreading firestorm was The Lost Bus, now a heavily-fictionalized docudrama by Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, United 93, three Jason Bourne sequels) about the school bus full of kids trying to get to safety.
Matthew McConaughey stars as Kevin McKay, a school bus driver with so many problems I suspected the most dishonest screenwriter in Hollyweird, Paul Haggis, was involved. He's a divorced dad whose estranged father recently died bringing him back home to Paradise, CA where his invalid mother (played by McConaughey's real mother) and surly son (played by his real son, Levi) live. He has to put his cancer-ridden dog down and his bus driving job seems on shaky ground due to his screwups which put him on the wrong side of the dispatcher, Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson, The Gilded Age).
On the morning of November 8, 2018, poorly maintained power lines spark in the high winds and set the tinder-dry undergrowth ablaze. Kevin is trying to balance getting his charges delivered to school while trying to get medicine back home to his sick son while Ruby is hectoring him to get the bus in for maintenance. As the blaze spreads, evacuation orders go out and 22 children at a school whose parents aren't able to come get them need a ride. Kevin is the only one in the area so he volunteers to pick them up in hopes it will earn some points with Ruby.
The class and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera, Ugly Barbie), get on board and of course things rapidly begin to fall apart as the roads are jammed with evacuees, communication with Ruby falters then fails, and the roaring blazes close in around them. It doesn't help that their first destination was closed and evacuated without their knowledge due to lost communication, so they're scrambling to find an alternate route to what seems to be safety.
Of course, they find time for Kevin and Mary to discuss their lives and disappointments while waiting for the blaze to consume them and as with the opening scenes, they ring false as Hollywood inventions to pad the run time and provide a respite between the thrilling action sequences. The problem with those is that apparently they never really happened and pretty much everything other than Kevin and Mary being real people and a bus full of kids needing to flee is invention including the "lost" aspect; they were stuck in traffic, but in constant contact.
But bolstering the fiction is the portrayal of the firefighters led by Ray Martinez (Yul Vazquez, Petey on Severance) and their doomed attempts to fight the fire culminating in their realizing there was nothing to be done but evacuate the population. Vazquez is so believable I wondered if Greengrass had cast real participants; I'm sure a lot of the extras are real firefighters; they look like real people.
I knocked a point off the score for The Lost Bus because of its overly-fictionalized plot and forced melodrama, but it's still a worthy watch as an action adventure flick. Perhaps they should've just gone fully fictional so the changes weren't so jarring.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on Apple TV+
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