Movie Review: ‘The End Of Oak Street’

Opening in theaters on August 14 is ‘The End Of Oak Street,’ written and directed by David Robert Mitchell and starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis, and P.

​Opening in theaters on August 14 is ‘The End Of Oak Street,’ written and directed by David Robert Mitchell and starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis, and P.   

Opening in theaters on August 14 is ‘The End Of Oak Street,’ written and directed by David Robert Mitchell and starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis, and P.J. Byrne.

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Initial Thoughts

Let’s just put it out there: can we please stop with the ‘80s nostalgia – and more specifically, the Amblin nostalgia? Yes, a certain generation of moviegoers loved the Amblin output of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and David Robert Mitchell – whose two previous movies, ‘It Follows’ and ‘Under the Silver Lake,’ were very different from this one – has clearly set out to pay homage to those innocent times of wondrous, family-oriented genre filmmaking with his new sci-fi thriller, ‘The End Of Oak Street.’

Except that his tribute to those films of yore – except for a truly insane third act that is as ludicrous as it is entertaining – falls mostly flat and flavorless, like a ChatGPT version of an Amblin movie. It’s got the high concept, it’s got all the tropes, it’s even got some split diopter shots – and yet it falls short, its tone veering all over the place, its cast lost at sea, and its plot largely absurd. But I can’t say I didn’t have a certain amount of fun.

Story and Direction

It’s 1982, and both Michael Giacchino’s overblown score and the overhead shots of a wholesome, idealized block party instantly tell us that the title setting is right out of that Amblin suburban milieu. Oak Street is the perfect little community, and the Platts – Denise (Anne Hathaway), Greg (Ewan McGregor), Audrey (Maisy Stella), and Brian (Christian Convery) – are seemingly the perfect family, even if there’s tension between Greg and Denise. The former has lost his job and is delivering pizzas, while the latter has secretly written a novel in which the protagonist leaves her husband and kids.

But all that gets swept aside (until resurfacing, like these issues always do, at later inopportune moments) when ‘ripples in space’ cause massive solar flares that somehow upend the Platts’ entire neighborhood and deposit it 200 million years in the past. All of a sudden the neatly manicured backyards give way to primitive jungles and swamps – and their huge, vicious, hungry inhabitants.

Yes, ‘The End Of Oak Street’ is a dinosaur movie, and that brings us to another major problem: dinosaurs just aren’t that much fun at the movies anymore (especially when they’re brought to life by inconsistent CG). After seven ‘Jurassic’ entries and assorted other knockoffs, the sense of awe and majesty that combined with terror to make these creatures so formidable on the big screen is just…gone. If you’ve seen one T-Rex, you’ve seen them all (even if Mitchell makes his accurately hairy), and in fact, there are at least two scenes in ‘Oak Street’ that you have seen before in the original 1993 ‘Jurassic Park.’

How did the neighborhood (called Flowervale, which was the original title of the movie) get here? And how can its inhabitants – which are oddly reduced to six or seven people, including the Platts – return to our time? There’s some yadda-yadda about portals and Mitchell mostly handwaves the explanations away, which would be fine if the rest of the movie was captivating enough to ignore the significant plot holes.

It’s all pretty by-the-numbers for the first half or so, although the initial discovery by the Platts of what’s happened is shot with a decent amount of intensity. It’s when we come to the homestretch, however, that things take a very wide turn: Mitchell seems to decide in real time to just chuck out the earnest yet serious Amblin vibe in favor of something nastier, more ridiculous, and yet more entertaining.

The deaths get meaner (including one shocker we didn’t see coming), the monsters get grosser (something like a giant, 100-foot slug winds through the Platt abode at one point), the subplots get sillier (including a late-breaking romantic triangle), the decisions get dumber, and we thought we’d seen it all until we saw dinosaurs copulating onscreen for the first time.

It all leads to an exhausting ending that fully dispenses with story’s internal logic and structure once and for all, but by that time the film’s last 35 minutes or so have been sufficiently amusing in that ‘so bad it’s good’ kind of way that it more or less makes up for the rote first hour.

Cast and Performances

Anne Hathaway (in the least of her four releases so far this year) and Ewan McGregor are pros who manage to acquit themselves well enough. McGregor’s Greg is a sad sack who wants to be protective and in control, but is reduced to comforting his son by saying that God won’t let them die. ‘You only go to church on Christmas,’ retorts Hathaway’s Denise, who’s much more pragmatic and ultimately stronger (although Greg does redeem himself later on). She exudes fierce mama bear energy even as her dream of writing her novel gets literally washed away.

Christian Convery is just whiny and annoying, sadly, as the son, while Maisy Stella generates some warmth, compassion, and smarts as the older daughter who’s got her eye on being a scientist. Character development is not exactly Mitchell’s strong suit here, a strange turnaround from the nuanced young people he developed for ‘It Follows.’

Final Thoughts

We can’t say we had a completely bad time at ‘The End Of Oak Street,’ and it may work as an air-conditioned time-waster during the dog days of August. Like another new movie about people trapped in their suburban bubbles by unexplainable phenomena – Netflix’s even more nonsensical ‘The Last House’ – this one could also be read as a metaphor for COVID lockdowns (a lot of couples dissolved during that fracas) or even modern civilization coming undone by climate change.

But that’s probably too generous a read. In the end, David Robert Mitchell simply wanted to make a dinosaurs-on-the-streets movie in that sweet ‘80s style (his producer, J.J. Abrams, tried a similar trick and failed with his Spielbergian alien movie, ‘Super 8’). Kudos to him for setting most of it in broad daylight, and for sticking to his guns for that bizarre last half hour or so. But can ‘The End Of Oak Street’ finally be the end of this obsession with that one particular stretch of film history? Otherwise the dinosaurs on the screen won’t be the only ones.

‘The End Of Oak Street’ receives a score of 55 out of 100.

What is the plot of ‘The End Of Oak Street’?

After a mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and transports their neighborhood to someplace unknown, the Platt family soon discovers that their very survival depends on them sticking together as they navigate their now unrecognizable surroundings.

Who is in the cast of ‘The End Of Oak Street’?

Anne Hathaway as Denise PlattEwan McGregor as Greg PlattMaisy Stella as Audrey PlattChristian Convery as Brian PlattJordan Alexa Davis as Jeannette ChristiansenP. J. Byrne as Mel JacobsAnne Gee Byrd as Mrs. HuddlestonEmily Kuroda as Mrs. Valcourt

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