The End of Oak Street ~ Review

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Sometimes all you want out of a movie is a crazy dinosaur rampage. It’s been an overloaded summer with multiple blockbusters trying to push my nostalgia buttons. Some of them have worked; some have not. So it was very pleasant for The End of Oak Street to stomp into theaters, a straightforward, no-nonsense, 100-minute dinosaur rampage.
 
It’s 1982 and Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor) are ordinary parents. Well, I say ordinary, but Greg is a not-so-secret alcoholic, while Denise is a secret aspiring author. Their marriage is hanging together by a thread. Their kids: eighteen-year-old Audrey (Maisy Stella) has her head in the clouds, filled with lofty ideas about going to Cornell and studying astrophysics, while thirteen-year-old Brian (Christian Convery) is starting to smoke cigarettes and might be becoming a bully. One night, strange lights flash outside, and the family wakes up the next morning to find that their normal Michigan suburb has been transported to prehistoric times. Forget fixing their marriage, the Platts now have to navigate preventing themselves from being eaten by all manner of prehistoric creatures.
 
The End of Oak Street is a ton of fun. It recalls various Amblin films from the 1980s, specifically Poltergeist and Gremlins, with its depiction of a “normal” suburb beset by otherworldly violence. The shadow of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park will loom large over any movie involving dinosaurs. However, writer-director David Robert Mitchell stages his dinosaur set pieces with horror and humor instead of Spielbergian wonder. Mitchell does, however, ape many of Spielberg’s directorial flourishes, giving the film even more of that Amblin feel. But Oak Street is meaner than an Amblin movie, and it casually shows dinosaurs eating people with reckless abandon. There’s a particular moment with a giant prehistoric snake that manages to be hilarious and terrifying all at the same time.
 
While the script has an emotional story, it’s not really designed for anything more than dinosaur mayhem, and the performances follow suit, with a lot of screaming and running away. But Hathaway and McGregor play their marital tension very well, along with normal parenting moments, and abject terror. Maisy Stella and Christian Convery are good at running in fear and feel like normal kids thrust into a crazy situation.
 
I love kaiju movies, so when a giant monster of any sort goes crazy in a metropolitan area, I enter my happy place. I’m not made of stone. The End of Oak Street is not the deepest movie; however, when a film comes along that manages to make dino carnage more compelling than five Jurassic Park sequels? It should be celebrated.
 
Three out of Four Stars