Review of 'The Lost Bus': 2018 Camp Fire becomes McConaughey Disaster Movie

Disasters are real, also, these days, terribly common, whether they are epic confluences of nature and negligence or the murderous and preventable type. And when it comes to disaster films, it is difficult to know what the acceptable level of exploitation is.

Of course, director Paul Grengrass could never be confused with the unexpected producer Irwin Allen (“The Tlowing Inferno”) or the filmmaker Roland Emmerich (“The Day after tomorrow”), ringmasters that preferred a-listers assistants in expensive calamities. Rather, when Grengrass, from documentaries, addresses the dark days of mass victims, tend to be true stories such as “United 93” and “Bloody Sunday”. His stripped and irregular style, absent names of marquee and focused on issues such as terrorism and community, brings intelligent urgency to the unfathomable.

However, with his new movie “The Lost Bus”, starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, about the real -life effort to save a school bus of Fire Camp 2018, a forest fire that would destroy most paradises, California, Grengrass is trying to merge the two sensibilities. This time mixes the star heroism with the show and the results can be galvanizing if they are closely framed.

“The Lost Bus” is not as powerful as the “Captain Phillips” of Grengrass, in which Tom Hanks anchored a recreated reality no less than any action of action box office. Instead, the director seems to be in a programmatic mode. There are nervous horror scenes that weld your seat, but they are interspersed among many that feel very sculpted for the effect of three -act characters by Greangrass and coguionist Brad Ingelsby.

McConaughey plays the driver of the Paradise Kevin McKay bus, whose life is written almost comically as especially challenged before a flame rolle approaches her: tied by cash, dying dog, recently dead father (without lost love), sullen teenage son (lost love), ex -wife (also unhappy) and a mother of memory. But on the afternoon of November 18, when the fires arrive at the Eastern Paradise, Kevin's is the only bus that can fulfill a request for its dispatcher (Ashlie Atkinson): collects the primary schools stranded and evacuating them to a safe place.

A failed father feeling the weight of sudden responsibility, Kevin Corrals as Co-Chaperone as a school teacher (América Ferrera). Although Mary is an anxious mother to reach her own son, she is willing to help. However, the occasional cut of Yul Vázquez as the rescue efforts of Fire Department is the barometer of this increasingly bad news film. As the smoke quickly darkens the day and the unstoppable fire hits on the bus, cutting routes, the trip takes a dystopian turn, raising bets and alarm levels at unimaginable heights. (Eaton and Palisades Survivors, just warning: you would never see this anyway).

McConaughey is a solid casting, its unwavering working class strength slightly dyed. In the solid presence of his and Ferrera and in the serrated frenzy of the edition style of Grengrass, a “the most short and stricter” Bus would still contain a lot of fear and dramatic resistance. The sequences of solo fire, captured in the hellish fluff of the cinematography of Pål Ulvik Rokseth, are pinnacles of this practical discipline of digital effects. But Kevin's redemption arc, distributed in mid -perio in tortured looks and forced dialogue, takes us out of intensity.

It is also strange that the activist mentality greangrass has not done more with a villain of SO Corporate: legally responsible utility PG & E, represented in the film by an ineffective suit that is briefly shout. Forget that the history of redemption: Grengrass could have been inclined even more in those tropes of action and, as a final touch, had McConaughey Punch PG & e in the jaw.