Matthew McConaughey vs. the Terror of Nature on Fire

Paul Greengrass is a director you can count on to bring intensity to a hitman adventure (The Bourne Myth), a fiction of occupied Iraq (Green zone) or whatever it takes. The Irishman had already injected narrative and visual steroids into thrillers based on real events such as United 93 and relapses with Labyrinth on Fire, which is about a school bus caught in a terrible fire. This isn't a tale of paradise lost, because it all begins with scenes in which the driver, played by Matthew McConaughey, appears dejected, almost defeated by life.

Images of the struggle for survival predominate, but the film's creators also give some space and time to the dramas of the unlikely hero and the teacher who accompanies the young passengers. They show the efforts of emergency workers and criticize the negligence of an energy company. The result has something of a basic platform production (in a semi-luxurious version) and, at the same time, good adult entertainment that doesn't completely surrender to the extreme schematism of film genres, and that maintains a certain connection with real life and the real world (in a spectacular version). However, Labyrinth on Fire It ends up resembling an apocalyptic film in which nature causes an almost religious terror. The bus wanders through smoky digital hells dominated by a fire with a life of its own that may recall (a memory of cinema) the ethereal devils that hover over the saga. Hellish Possession.