If The End of Oak Street was just 100 minutes of Ewan McGregor smashing dinosaurs with a sledgehammer, it would be pretty great. If you then added in Anne Hathaway blasting at them with a massive shotgun too, things get taken up a notch. And when those dinosaurs are not in a theme park, but in a familiar-looking 1980s neighborhood because of time travel, well, that’s incredibly random, but we are all in.
Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows), The End of Oak Street is all of that and much more. It’s surprising, it’s exciting, it’s heartfelt and dramatic. It also, at times, struggles to find the right balance between its suburban setting and massive action beats. And yet, that tiny flaw and others never change the fact that it’s a well-made, entertaining dino-adventure that feels like it could’ve been released during the era in which it’s set.
Set during the summer of 1982, The End of Oak Street centers on the Platt family. There’s the mother, Denise (Hathaway), father Greg (McGregor), older daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), son Brian (Christian Convery), and a Battlestar Galactica-named dog, Starbuck. They’re a pretty typical family. Audrey doesn’t quite fit in, Brian gets into a lot of trouble, Greg is out of work, and Denise struggles to hold the whole thing together while also harboring her own secrets. They’ve all got issues. There are some complex dynamics between them, but hey, they love each other. And it’s the 1980s, so they’ve got cassette tapes, rotary telephones, terrible fashion, and all that good stuff. Basically, it feels like it’s set in a shared universe with all of the Amblin films of the 1980s, along with Stranger Things, which has the same DNA.
Mitchell spends a healthy amount of the film’s surprisingly short runtime setting up those characters and their world. This delays the dinos a bit, but also gives the movie its own unique flair. He wants us to understand this place and these people before that place travels back in time a few million years and gets dropped in the middle of a dinosaur-filled ecosystem. Which, even just writing it, sounds pretty weird, and the movie never quite explains it in a wholly satisfying way. But, somehow, everything is grounded enough that it fits and you go with it.
Once that happens, The End of Oak Street changes, but not as much as you’d expect. The dinosaurs don’t immediately come parading through the film. Mitchell leans heavily on the character development and filmmaking to keep building tension and mystery. Lots of that comes from the film’s delightful cinematography by Michael Gioulakis. As the camera follows the characters around, every inch of every frame is used to build anticipation. We’ll catch a glimpse of something moving in the background. Linger on an object that becomes important later. See something terrifying almost out of frame, but not quite. The tactic is employed throughout and gets exponentially bigger once the Platts figure out dinosaurs are running around. But early on, it’s somehow even more delightful to watch as they walk around with no clue what’s going on, and the film’s inevitability quietly lurks for the audience to see.
That almost claustrophobic feeling becomes not just one of the film’s biggest assets, but also a bit of a liability. As you’d expect, once the story starts becoming more about surviving the dinosaurs, the chaos continues to ramp up. The dinosaurs get bigger. The stakes get more intense. And it’s all captured within the confines of Mitchell’s tight-knit filmmaking. Lots of close-ups. Sparingly populated streets. As that happens, though, certain big moments arrive in an almost shocking way. The film kind of goes from zero to 100 and then back to zero in terms of action a bunch of times throughout. This obviously was done to maximize surprise and excitement. But because these scenes stand out from an otherwise relatively quiet little movie, it does make them feel a little out of place. The juxtaposition definitely has an impact, but it also works ever so slightly against the film as a whole. It’s not quite the seamless journey it wants to be.
And yet, those moments are so freaking good, you forgive some slight unevenness. This is where you get your sledgehammers, your shotguns, and some other insane surprises we’d never dare spoil. It’s just simply entertaining to see dinosaurs running around a suburban neighborhood, through houses, and more, with an action level akin to Jurassic Park. But, probably because of Jurassic Park, Mitchell does his best to focus on less familiar dinosaurs, which also results in some memorable moments.
McGregor is fun and really funny as Greg, especially thanks to the amazing costume design by Erin Benach, while Stella and Convery both play great ’80s teens. But, as is often the case, it’s Hathaway who really shines in the film. Her character has the most going on, so it makes sense, but beyond that she exhibits an ease and gravitas that even Obi-Wan Kenobi himself struggles to match. It’s her performance and character that make the film’s very familiar-feeling (almost too much so) ending resonate in a way that leaves you smiling when the credits roll.
The End of Oak Street is just fun, plain and simple. It achieves that by giving us relatable, human characters in a recognizable setting that then gets overrun by dinosaurs in the most hilarious and random ways imaginable. Do we care that it’s so out there? No, we do not. Do we care a bit that the film has more peaks and valleys than we’d like? A little, but that never fully ruins the overall experience.
The End of Oak Street opens August 14.
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