The End of Oak Street Has More In Common With Poltergeist Than Jurassic Park [REVIEW]

Dinosaurs on the big screen have been something of a focal point across cinema history, especially as our own understanding of the creatures has continued to evolve. Not only do they appear in King Kong in a major way in 1933, but also in Buster Keaton’s Three Ages ten years prior. The appeal of dinosaurs stretches across the decades but hit its peak in the 1990s after Jurassic Park. Steven Spielberg’s classic not only delivered the best plot reason for why dinosaurs could exist in the modern era, but also showed that dynamic filmmaking could turn them into cinematic monsters that were awe-inspiring as well as terrifying. As expected, it created a boom of imitators.

Few films have been able to manage that appeal since, but with The End of Oak Street, writer/director David Robert Mitchell has managed to deliver one of the first real blockbuster-scale films in this niche subgenre that has nothing to do with the Jurassic franchise. Armed with a good idea and a great cast, Mitchell’s movie is a fun time at the movies that calls back to the ’80s not only in its setting but in the tone of the story and the characters. The good news is it manages to overcome a lot of the faults, but the bad news is it will also leave you scratching your head.

Rating: 3 out of 5

The End of Oak Street Harkens to the Meaner Amblin Movies

Set against the backdrop of a Michigan suburb in the 1980s, The End of Oak Street follows the Platt family, played by Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, and Christian Convery, who all seem to have life figured out from the first thirty seconds of the film, only for all the secrets they’re keeping from each other to become clear over the next fifteen minutes.

The opening of the film is clunky and a rough watch, enough that if the promise of dinosaurs later wasn’t already planted in your mind, you might brace for a dense, unsatisfying melodrama. Luckily, The End of Oak Street quickly pivots when it needs to, letting the unexplainable happenings in the town begin to form the story until two miles of the town is suddenly lifted and thrown into the prehistoric era.

By using the veneer of this specific setting, The End of Oak Street can immediately conjure to mind Amblin movies of this era. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the real influence is more Gremlins and Poltergeist than E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Beneath this calm suburban veneer is actually chaos, with a shocking mean streak to be found in its dinosaur-centric action that Spielberg himself would probably never tread, but Joe Dante and Tobe Hooper might. The way a raptor leaps on a woman and immedietly siezes her head in its mouth before wrestling her to the ground with ease proves that.

Shocking No One, Anne Hathaway Is Great Inside the B-Movie Aura

The ’80s setting of The End of Oak Street isn’t just its narrative structure and clear influence at play, but something that it injects into the performances. Mitchall has many of his stars deliver big, bombastic emotions, clearly adopting a style of acting meant to sell to a young audience how characters feel at any given moment, the kind of thing that can feel like it’s flirting with being over the top. Many of the actors in the film struggle with this, either because they can’t make the big emotions feel earnest or because they can’t match their scene partners.

As expected, the person who does not have that problem is Anne Hathaway. The Odyssey star is not only the best performer in the film, but her work is multifaceted. Early on in The End of Oak Street is becomes clear that Hathaway’s Denise doesn’t actually like where life has taken her, and might even daydream about leaving her family behind. When the opportunity presents itself after their Jurassic transplant, though, she not only has to wrestle with those feelings on screen but also has to face the reality of what it would mean to abandon them.

Hathaway can not only sell the raw emotion of a neighborhood mom having to face domestic turmoil but also the action set pieces of fighting prehistoric monsters. There are few moments with the beasts that don’t include her, and those aren’t quite as memorable, on top of the fact that the characters that do appear are ones with limited personality. One sequence in particular, with what can only be described as a gigantic prehistoric snake, is one of the few to include every character in the scene, but Hathaway still steals the moment.

The End of Oak Street Stretches Its Idea

The End of Oak Street does have a “reason” for why everything in the movie happens, and does its best to explain it quickly, so quickly, in fact, that it’s almost comical. This is clearly done to just get the audience where they want to be (watching regular people fight dinosaurs in their neighborhood), which might be one of its greatest strengths. By making sure the plot and its thematic arcs are in the right place, The End of Oak Street can quickly start delivering a slew of Jumanji-like set pieces centered around dinosaur chaos.

One of the real strengths of The End of Oak Street is that David Robert Mitchell is a patient director. He allows each moment and the lingering threat of whatever multi-toothed monster is around the corner to go on just long enough that the anticipation reaches a real boiling point, with the release of the scene delivering a big laugh, jump, or sigh of relief. Mitchell proved he could handle this expertly in It Follows, and shows he hasn’t lost the spin on his fastball here (meaning the sequel to that movie just shot up in anticipation).

There is one very irritating choice made visually for The End of Oak Street, which is Mitchell’s insistence on using split diopter shots. A camera trick that allows one half of the screen to focus on the foreground and the other half to focus on the background, it’s a filmmaking choice that long has fans pointing at the screen and nudging their friends to notice. Mitchell deploys the tactic so frequently that the novelty is not only lost, but the staging of the scene begins to lose any sense of scale. It’s a weird, weird choice.

By the end of…well, The End of Oak Street, the film has delivered exactly what it says on the tin: A surprising sci-fi movie with dinosaurs attacking a neighborhood and the suburbanites having to fight back. It also doesn’t overstay its welcome, exactly, but it takes so long to get to the interesting moments that it feels somewhat thin on the whole. That said, you also got the chance to sit in a movie theater and watch dinosaurs attack people, screaming, shrieking, and laughing with your fellow audience members, so it’s not all bad.

The End of Oak Street debuts in theaters Friday, August 14.