“The End of Oak Street” is a creature feature about a seemingly-idyllic suburban family going through some hard times. 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. The parents’ marriage is hanging by a thread and the kids hate being caught in the middle. But all that family drama is about to be interrupted by a most outlandish danger.
Bright lights flash in the middle of the night. Pets go missing. Giant piles of dung appear in neighbors’ backyards. The neighborhood, thanks to a series of unexplained wormholes, is gradually switching places with land from 200 million years ago. Soon the area is infested with dinosaurs, and the new residents are less pleased to “meet” their neighbors as they are to “eat” them. The family, along with sadly-orphaned neighbor girl Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), are going to have to work together to survive, despite their strained relationship.
I wasn’t digging the “nearly-broken family” dynamic in “The End of Oak Street.” Action and disaster movies have been milking this trope for decades, and the uninteresting Platt family storyline costs this movie my recommendation. But I was digging the dinosaurs. We get nice, long, well-lit shots of the creatures, and the harrowing action sequences are some of the best I’ve seen in a long time. I can completely understand someone else thinking that all the dino-action saves the movie for them, it just doesn’t for me.
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 rrg251@nyu.edu.
