'The End of Oak Street' Review: David Robert Mitchell’s Bloody Dino Blast Curbstomps Jurassic World With Actual Suspense
Since Stranger Things is finally done (thank god) and left a sour taste in everyone’s mouth, someone proficient in milking ‘80s nostalgia had to pick up the slack. If the Duffers aren’t doing it, you can count on J.J. Abrams. But thankfully, the “Spielberg for millennials but worse” is only producing here, not directing. David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street – a vast departure from It Follows and Under the Silver Lake – is a homage to heyday Amblin‑era ‘80s cinema, following a family whose suburban neighborhood gets mysteriously transported to the Jurassic era. And honestly? It was more of a rip‑roaring blast than I expected.
Considering that Spielberg’s bastardized Jurassic series keeps stomping on my face and resurfacing as the bane of my existence, The End of Oak Street and, coincidentally, the new Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie, might be the best dino‑centric movies we’ve had this century. Both of them straight‑up curbstomp the entire Jurassic World series like Peter, Michael, and Samir did that printer in Office Space.
Image copyright (©) Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
MPA Rating: PG-13 (for strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, and suggestive material.)
Runtime: 1 Hour and 39 Minutes (99 minutes)
Language: English
Production Companies: Bad Robot, Jackson Pictures
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Screenwriter: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis, P. J. Byrne, Chris Coy
Set in 1982, the Platts are having a dysfunctional time in their quiet little suburb. Patriarch Greg (Ewan McGregor) prioritizes his pizza delivery job over family quality time. His unfulfilled wife, Denise (Anne Hathaway), pours all her desire to run away into her book-writing hobby, which she escapes to in the basement, usually in the middle of the night. Their astronomy‑avid daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) longs for connection, while their youngest son Brian (Christian Convery) broke a kid’s arm and is crushing on the new neighbor next door (Jordan Alexa Davis). None of them can communicate properly, though when they do spend time together, they truly seem to love each other.
It’s all fleeting because it seems the on‑the‑rocks parents are one argument away from calling it quits, until a beam of light flashes during a storm. Instantly, the rain stops, the power goes out, the water system fails, and the family dog, Starbuck (Brisket), disappears. The next morning, they try to go about their lives until they slowly realize their entire suburb has been transported to the Jurassic period, slap dabbed in the middle of a forest. Now facing carnivorous dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures, the family must survive and figure out how to get back to the future in one piece.
Mitchell brings suspense, spectacle, and a little deranged energy to Amblin nostalgia.
Caption: (L-r) EWAN McGREGOR as Greg Platt and ANNE HATHAWAY as Denise Platt in “The End of Oak Street,” A Warner Bros. Pictures release.
In a summer when Spielberg couldn’t quite completely capture his whimsical magic with Disclosure Day – which I found muddled due to David Koepp’s uneven script despite its exciting action sequences moments – David Robert Mitchell channels the intricate cues and tricks of the Amblin-era family features. Eschewing your average ‘80s iconography, the nostalgic nutrients here stem from the film’s structure, its spirit, and Michael Giacchino’s John Williams/Alan Silvestri‑esque score. Mitchell, an early pioneer of elevated horror, finds utility in the tension building across the film’s many survival sequences.
He delivers what the Jurassic World movies have lacked forever: suspense. Whether it’s Denise blasting away dinosaurs with a shotgun or Greg narrowly escaping an unseen raptor, Mitchell’s blocking skills are on full display. Regardless of the location within Maya Shimoguchi’s picturesque suburbia production design, he extracts a balance of terror and sheer adrenaline. There are countless Spielbergisms in his approach, particularly in dynamic tracking shots where the Platts evade dinos on foot or in their car. But ever so often, Mitchell channels traces of Joe Dante, or even his trollish Silver Lake persona, employing an absurdist IDGAF energy. Some risqué, raunchy jokes – godspeed to the Industrial Light & Magic VFX artists animating the fuzzy, uniquely designed dinos doing it on a house as if it’s the only day of the year sex is legal – run amok and it’s the freshest elements that make it stand out in its favor.
I do draw that troll line at the countless uses of split diopters, which Oak Street is addicted to. Looking at this and Lee Cronin of Lee Cronin’sThe Mummy, both filmmakers need to go to split-diopter rehab because their movies apparently can’t breathe without it.
When people are devoured and slaughtered by the prehistoric predators, Mitchell lets you know you will be seeing some real carnage. It may boast the same PG-13 rating as the Jurassic World, series but Oak Street makes all its kills look like an episode of Barney & Friends. Each death is wince-worthy and unsettling, as if it’s dragging you close and screaming, “LOOK AT IT!” The dino VFX might be considerably unpolished, but the chaos they leave in their wake is effective nonetheless. My heart rate was on a meteoric rise throughout; I slapped my head going, “Oh, duh, dinosaurs are fucking scary.” Surprisingly the film goes out there with some vicious kills will rid you of any preconceived notion that plot armor exists in this realm.
The family drama falters, but the prehistoric mayhem absolutely rips.
Caption: (L-r) CHRISTIAN CONVERY as Brian Platt, MAISY STELLA as Audrey Platt, JORDAN ALEXA DAVIS as Jeanette and ANNE HATHAWAY as Denise Platt, in “The End of Oak Street,” A Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Par for the course for many ‘80s gems like Back to the Future and The Goonies, the film plants its seeds in the fractures of the family’s complicated dynamic. Although it’s got a lengthy setup, the characterization falls short. Despite fine performances from Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway, who lift the horror elements, hardly any of the family members have distinct traits, and they feel poorly realized. The Platts are variants of every ‘80s nuclear family archetype — the only subversion being Audrey’s quiet queerness getting an unexpected romantic W (I mean that’s why you cast Maisy “Chloe in Life is Strange” Stella). Mitchell’s screenplay is more caught up in the thrills and chills and only ever so often reminds us that the dinos enlarge the wedge between the family.
I respect the movie for not mining vernacular and visual cues for nostalgia. At best, the only real song cue is Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” in a tender, humanistic scene where Audrey tries to find normalcy through a therapeutic song at the height of unspeakable terror. However, it tends to use its influences as a scapegoat for nonsensical beats that don’t fit into the story, or for a resolution that disrupts the sanctity of its boldest story turns.
At a major turning point, the film gave me the same shocked sensation Hoppers did by its midpoint, and I was completely in for the unpredictability nature in its proceeding beats. Contrarily, the sci‑fi resolution takes a very Back to the Future‑like direction without doing any proper work for the dysfunctional family’s arc. It’s a cheap resolution with faulty character development (or lack thereof).
Whatever grievance I have with The End of Oak Street doesn’t negate how much fun it is. It delivers a dog‑days‑of‑summer original blockbuster thrill ride that should be more frequent in summer movie seasons than your quintessential capeshit. The characters may be thin, but the committed performances, genuine suspense, and intensity roars. It proves you can build genuinely tense, bone‑crunching dinosaur action without insulting your audience – something the brain‑dead Jurassic World executives still haven’t figured out.
