"The Lost Bus" - TIFF's New Star-Studded Dad Movie

My favorite genre to lovingly make fun of of all time is the Dad movie. They’re so easy to clown on, but also so unabashedly sincere that for all of their faults they remain so timeless and nostalgic. English filmmaker, Paul Greengrass is one of the most consistent providers of the Dad movie, and also one of the best. At 70 years old, his return to the subgenre, The Lost Bus, reaffirms that he still has serious skill in the director’s chair. So much so in fact, that it almost makes you forget how rough a lot of the stuff surrounding it is. 

Greengrass himself introduced the film at its TIFF world premiere on Friday night. Fellow audience members also had the honor of experiencing the film with the real life heroes in attendance. All of this to emphasize that I was pretty terrified for the first thirty minutes of the film, because it was playing like a Tubi original your Mom inexplicably finds after scrolling for an hour. The narrative is largely unfocused, the dialogue felt barely first draft level, and in turn every performer besides McConaughey unfortunately didn’t have the Oscar-winning talents to make the delivery of said dialogue sound believable. 

Thankfully once the wildfire in the film begins to spread, Greengrass’ talents, as well as the extraordinary editing by William Goldenberg and Paul Rubell, make the rest of the film entertaining and intense. The CGI work ranges from being amazing to resembling a PlayStation 2 game, but the direction is enough to make the fake look passable. 

The beating heart of the film is America Ferrera who is spectacular as teacher, Mary Ludwig. Her loving, maternal nature offers some really great comedic juxtapositions to McConaughey’s gruff grittiness. They play off each other wonderfully, and you can sleep soundly tonight knowing that they didn’t try and force in some godforsaken fictional romance subplot between the two to try and get you on board. The story feels very faithful, and trusts that it’s enough, and it is. 

Furthermore, what I found to be largely impressive in the second two acts was the pacing. We cut away from the bus every ten to fifteen minutes or so to get an exposition recap from borderline nameless essential worker characters, but for the most part, we’re solely on that bus. Obviously how much of what we see being accurate to the real-life story is not known to me, but the film walks a delicate balance of making sure that obstacles are always in these characters’ way without feeling too over-glamorized. 

The dialogue throughout the film is questionable at best and riddled with convention and cliche. McConaughey has a familial subplot that the film desperately tries to make interesting by inserting phone calls every now and again with his family. Unfortunately, these moments often come across as unintentionally humorous thanks to line readings that rival Ice Cube in War of the Worlds. 

Despite all of this, the finale of the film is genuinely white-knuckled, and the final moments of the climax caused a massive round of applause from the audience. For how blockbuster-y the entire thing is, the final scene offers a tremendously grim look at the real-life consequences without all of the glitz and the glamor of your average Hollywood picture. It’s not one to make you so sad that forget how much fun you just had, but one that offers a reminder just stern enough that maybe Taylor Swift will think twice about taking the private jet on her next trip to Erewhon. 

For as deeply flawed as this film is on a technical level, the emotionality and passion was tremendously strong, and it brings a timely and relevant amount of awareness towards an issue that has not been properly discussed. That, to me, encapsulates one of the many important things that cinema is all about.