THE END OF OAK STREET Review

"I think that our neighborhood...our house...our whole street has moved."

It's been a while since we got a movie from David Robert Mitchell, director of It Follows. The last time he had a movie in theaters was back in 2019 when Under the Silver Lake graced our silver screens. The film garnered mixed responses and was a box-office flop but has since gained a cult following. I, myself, recalled it was a bit too long but found the journey to be an interesting experience to say the least. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for his latest outing.

The End of Oak Street revolves around the Platt family living in a suburban community. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring writer, who's marriage with Greg (Ewan McGregor) is strained, but the couple keep their appearances on a positive note in front of their kids, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). One night, a mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street and transport itself to the Jurassic period. The Platt family realize that in order to survive, they'll need to depend on each other now more than ever if they're to get out of this predicament.

We're living in an era where Hollywood isn't providing a lot of original films. And if they are, they're films not based on any known IP but are using writing tropes to make them digestible for audiences. While I'm perfectly fine with these filmmakers doing a "I'm inspired by this filmmaker" film, I just wish they added more of their own voice to make these stories stand out. Take for example Wayne Kramer's Running Scared. That's a Tarantino-wannabe with its generic plot and thinly written characters, but what makes that work is the unique, memorable style and consistent tone while adding in a faster pace to it.

The End of Oak Street has some of what I like about David Robert Mitchell, in that he's taking these ordinary characters and putting them within goofy or abnormal situations. The biggest problem I had with it outside of being another Jurassic Park-knockoff is that there's not much new material to make it fresh. I was honestly surprised how underwhelmed I was with the experience, as the quote-unquote "tense" moments felt pretty stale by creature feature standards. I guess I can give the movie a few points for not having a dinosaur smile to the camera like they did in Fallen Kingdom.

The dinosaur sequences in this could be fun to watch, if you like seeing creatures run around eating people. For me, it got repetitive fairly quickly, as there isn't enough variety to make the picture stand out. I also found the characters to be flatly written, despite their performances being fine. The one performance that stood out to me on a positive note was Anne Hathaway.

I don't know why, but I'm slowly being won over by her. It's not like Anne's doing an amazing job here, but I'm so used to not liking her performances in most things. But between this and The Odyssey, I'm really digging her more recent work as an actress. It's not award-worthy work, but given what the material is, Anne could've easily phoned it in.

VFX company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), were responsible for the creature effects and while they're not on par with the earlier Jurassic films, the work here is hit or miss. Sometimes they look pretty good and other times they looked fine. If nothing else, it's a step up in quality overall compared to the more recent Jurassic sequels.

I almost wonder if there was a longer cut to this, because at times there were certain subplots that were dropped or forgotten about just so we could move the story along. Or maybe they were added in as a studio note to make this feel like that Spielberg-inspired film? Regardless, The End of Oak Street was unfortunately a forgettable experience.

If it had more memorable characters or a more unique spin on things, I might've been a little more entertained by this. It works as a disposable, popcorn flick to watch near the end of Summer. Outside of that? You may not get much milage out of this monster vehicle.

🍿 SCORE = 57/100