The 98th Academy Awards nominated “The Lost Bus” (2025) for “Best Visual Effects.” The latest film from director Paul Greengrass adapts Lizzie Johnson’s 2021 book, “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire.” (Fun fact: Johnson is one of the reporters who was laid off from “The Washington Post” while in Kyiv, Ukraine on February 16, 2026.) Set from November 7, 2018 at 4 pm through the following fateful day in Paradise, West California, it follows a down on his luck forty-four-year-old bus driver, Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), who suddenly finds himself responsible for transporting twenty-two kids from Ponderosa Elementary to their parents in the middle of what is now considered the most destructive wildfire in California history. Without any communication lines to rely on, he and teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), must figure out how to get through a gauntlet of fire, desperate armed people and wreckage. Will they make it?
“The Lost Bus” is not the kind of film that translates well from the large screen to a computer desktop. Greengrass is known for capturing the chaos of an emergency and plunging the viewer into the middle of it, so it feels visceral, but on a smaller screen, conveying the smoke induced darkness and confusion of the day just obscures everything and makes it harder to stay focused on the action for the entire runtime. Fortunately the story is so innately engrossing that you will want to hang on to figure out how those kids got out of the perfect storm of a worst case scenario: the most green bus driver who is barely competent on a less eventful day, a failure in safety protocols and corporate infrastructure, a complete lack of resources devoted to prioritizing children’s safety, and the usual West Coast traffic issues.
The day before the fire, Kevin is not killing it in any area of his life. He cannot even get his time sheet in and does not maintain his bus. His dog dies. His son, Shaun (Levi McConaughey) hates him. He is taking care of his elderly disabled mom, Sherry (Kay McConaughey) who is barely functional. He and the pharmacist are so incompetent that he thinks getting Tylenol home to his son will actually make his kid feel better and is willing to risk his paycheck to get it to him. (My dude, you do not already have Tylenol at home?) Without Monday morning quarterbacking, “The Lost Bus” never quite reassures its audience that Kevin did not make the entire proceeding a little more challenging than it had to be (he takes a different road than planned and the lack of maintenance may have caused some minor delays), but it does an efficient job of suggesting that everyone else did worst so he is in the clear, especially since he did his job and correctly judged before everyone else that the fire would threaten the town.
McConaughey is convincing as the scrappy, beleaguered, but determined sad sack who cares about the kids as surrogates for the care that he wishes that he could have given his son. McConaughey does not temper Kevin’s most annoying traits. Kevin’s winning grace may be his inability to just do his damn job, which may have made him better at his job in a disaster so his hardscrabble MacGyvering and nervous energy would be put to service in saving twenty-four souls. Sir planned to straight-faced fight walls of flame with a single fire extinguisher and a shirt.
Ferrera is the kind of actor that immediately imbues her characters with credibility so even though Mary is a damn fool for taking her time with loading the kids on the bus and making a pit stop for water, Ferrera makes those decisions seem wise though barely. Mary redeems herself after they arrive at their first pitstop, and she comes up with a backup plan that ends up being the right move though no one ever communicated the information to them. The two characters have a predictable dynamic that starts off fractious and gradually becomes a unified solidarity once they understand that they abandoned their primary personal duty to their family to save others’ kids. They are ultimately everyday heroes without the tools to succeed.
While Greengrass captures how things got out of control, at the end, when it says that the Pacific Gas & Electric was responsible for the disaster, it is unclear how other than perhaps failing to turn off the electricity when ordered. Also, Kevin’s supervisor, Ruby Bishop (Ashlie Atkinson), said that emergency services were looking out for Kevin’s bus. Considering the circumstances, it is understandable that they were too preoccupied to do that, but they were absolutely not if the movie depicted the situation accurately. If Kevin and Mary were remarkable, it is for actually caring about the kids.
“The Lost Bus” starts like a postmodern version of a Seventies disaster film chronicles the steps towards conflagration with everyone doing their best job and failing. It tidily jumps from a Good Samaritan truck driver to the control room monitoring the area using surveillance cameras then transmitting the information to Cal Fire officials who are deliberating on safe, next steps. These characters are shown in action but are otherwise not differentiated or memorable. Chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez) and the battalion chief, Jen Kissoon (Kate Wharton), are recognizable from sheer screentime, but other than earnest concern and focus, it is unclear what we are supposed to glean. Was it pivotal to debate whether it is one fire or two separate ones? One scene shows how quickly a rescue can go wrong possibly to contrast Kevin and Mary’s relatively unscathed rescue. What happened to those people? Dunno.
Also, “The Lost Bus” never deals with the elephant in the room: Shaun and Kevin’s ex, Linda (Kimberli Flores), don’t give a crap about whether Sherry lives or dies. It definitely feels as if there is more to the story than shown on screen. Instead, it becomes a pat resolution with Shaun magically learning from Kevin’s daddy issues and breaking the cycle. It is great that the McConaughey got three paychecks instead of one, but no one would have any idea that the onscreen McKay family was the offscreen McConaughey family. All of the characters were aggravating together, and yikes, let’s hope they were acting. It was surprising that Kevin never verbally expressed surprise that his cell phone stopped working, but the fire was more relaxing than his phone calls.
“The Lost Bus” may be deserving of its Oscar nom for special effects, but it does not translate to a computer screen. As an entertaining disaster film, it is a Sunday night television movie with better production values and star power. It feels unlikely that this film will turn into a compulsive rewatch like “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), “The Towering Inferno” (1974) or “Earthquake” (1974). Still it made me want to read the book and find out more about the real life story.
