‘Lost Bus’ traffics in courage amid deadly chaos

“The Lost Bus” is a story of real-life heroism that plays like a runaway tour through a burning house.

Based on events that took place during the 2018 Camp Fire — the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history — the movie is effective human drama but is more successful as a visceral, digitally enhanced theme park ride.

If you are at all interested, I advise you to see the movie in theaters rather than on Apple TV+, where it will feel like a bonfire as opposed to the big-screen inferno it deserves to be experienced as.

Matthew McConaughey has one of his grittier, more taciturn roles as Kevin McKay, a down-on-his-luck school bus driver in Paradise. Divorced and supporting a disabled mother (Kay McCabe McConaughey, the star’s actual mom) and a sullenly angry teenage son (Levi McConaughey, his son), Kevin is well aware that the world sees him as a loser, and McConaughey conveys the desperation of a decent, hapless man trying to hold his life together against tall odds.

Screenwriter Brad Ingelsby, adapting one narrative strand from Lizzie Johnson’s 2021 book “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” isn’t shy about portraying the hardships of this country’s underclass.

Director Paul Greengrass has made a specialty of dramatizing crises of recent history in “United 93” (2006), “Captain Phillips” (2013) and “22 July” (2018), and he’s an expert at delivering the larger picture while zooming in to focus on individual dramas.

“The Lost Bus” regularly pulls back from Kevin to track the Camp Fire from its first spark via a faulty Pacific Gas & Electric transmission tower on the morning of Nov. 8 and its rapid spread under high winds to threaten and then engulf the community of Concow and the town of Paradise.

Yul Vazquez (“Severance”) plays Cal Fire Battalion Chief Ray Martinez, a composite character, and Kate Wharton is his second-in-command. Greengrass builds suspense from the spectacle of groups of professionals coping with a situation spinning out of control. The sequences set in Paradise are studies in process under pressure as schools are evacuated, the roads quickly become jammed, and local heroes like Kevin’s boss, school bus dispatcher Ruby Bishop (Ashlie Atkinson), move heaven and earth to ferry their charges to safety as a wall of wildfire bears down on them.

Within this larger picture, the long, nail-biting saga of Kevin’s bus ride becomes more and more prominent. Rerouting at the last minute to pick up a group of schoolchildren and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), Kevin barrels down back roads, past stalled traffic and mazes of first-responder vehicles and — as the blaze kettles the vehicle toward a climactic run — through a vision of hell on earth that feels close enough to singe a viewer’s hair.

McConaughey and Ferrera make the relationship between the driver and the teacher, thrown together in a terrifying ordeal but coming to respect each other’s professionalism and humanity, exceptionally moving. But even these two skilled performers ultimately take a back seat to the overwhelming ferocity of the visual effects, which end up feeling like the film’s reason for being.

At its best, “The Lost Bus” offers a testament to people’s courage, solo or in groups, when faced with deadly chaos. At its worst, it reduces the biggest fire-related calamity in recent memory — 85 deaths, about $16 billion in damage and an area five times the size of San Francisco burned to the ground — to an effective but impersonal disaster movie.