Movie Review: “The End of Oak Street”
By Bob Garver
“The End of Oak Street” is a creature feature about a seemingly-idyllic suburban family that is secretly going through some hard times. Those times become harder and less secret when their neighborhood is attacked by dinosaurs. It’s like a “Jurassic Park” movie, except it doesn’t have to come up with a way for its characters to go to an island filled with dinosaurs – the dinosaurs conveniently come to them.
Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway) Platt raise their teenage children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) on Oak Street in the sickeningly sweet suburb of Flowervale, MI in 1982. Beneath all the sunshine and roses, the family is hanging on by a thread. Greg has lost his full-time job and is delivering pizzas to make what little cash he can. Aspiring author Denise is working on a novel about an unfulfilled housewife with a loser husband, and Greg isn’t happy about it. Audrey is about to lose all of her friends to college while she stays in the same town. Brian is having trouble with a bully and struggling to talk to his crush Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis). But the big problem is that the parents are on the edge of divorce and the kids hate being caught in the middle.
Unrelated to the various personal dramas, strange things start happening in the vicinity. Bright lights flash. Pets go missing. Giant piles of dung appear in neighbors’ backyards. Could it be some sort of elaborate prank? Or is the neighborhood, thanks to a series of unexplained wormholes, gradually switching places with a patch of land from 200 million years ago? There wouldn’t be a movie here if it was the former, so of course it’s the latter.
Yes, the area is soon infested with dinosaurs, and the new residents are less pleased to “meet” their new neighbors as they are to “eat” them. And there’s no driving away, as all roads have been broken by… let’s say plate tectonics. The family, along with a sadly-orphaned Jeannette, are going to have to work together to survive. Can they get through this crisis when they were already having trouble getting through their daily lives?
I wasn’t digging the “nearly-broken family” dynamic. Action and disaster movies have been milking this trope for decades, and this one doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. If anything, it’s a particularly tame version of what can go on behind closed doors. But I was digging the dinosaurs. We get nice, long, well-lit shots of the creatures, with very little cheating by way of darkness, rain, or other obstructions. Action sequences are harrowing, a few laughs are eye-popping, and there’s more violence here than in a typical PG-13 movie in this era (though it probably would have gotten a mere PG in 1982, the year that brought us “Raiders of the Lost Ark”).
It took me a long time – too long, in fact – to get invested in “The End of Oak Street.” The Platt family drama was just too uninteresting for too much of the movie, and it loses my recommendation because of it. But that doesn’t mean that the dinosaur action isn’t some of the best action, dinosaur-related or otherwise, that I’ve seen in a long time. I can completely understand someone else thinking that it saves the movie for them, it just doesn’t for me. This movie came very close to winning me over, but by the time the credits rolled, I was happy to have reached the end of “Oak Street.”
Grade: C
“The End of Oak Street” is rated PG-13 for some strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language and suggestive material. Its running time is 99 minutes.
Contact Bob Garver at [email protected].
