Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor are the parents in a 1982 suburb overrun by dinosaurs in David Robert Mitchell's shamelessly fun thriller.
“The End of Oak Street” belongs to the genre I call the last-gasp-of-summer movie. A movie in this category has several characteristics, starting with the fact that it has to be released in the middle of August or later. Beyond that, a last-gasp-of-summer movie is trashy and obvious, it’s usually ripped off from other movies, and it wears a shameless grin on its face about all of that. At the same time, it demands a certain size and scale — a straggling pretense of popcorn lavishness that marks it as a genuine final entry in the blockbuster season. (If it’s any smaller, you know that the summer is already over.)
In “The End of Oak Street,” a tranquil middle-class neighborhood gets attacked by dinosaurs, so it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call the film “Jurassic World: Suburban Apocalypse.” There have been seven “Jurassic” movies, but to some of us it feels like there have been 27, and “The End of Oak Street” might as well be the 28th. The film has nothing whatsoever to do with that fabled franchise, but rarely have I encountered such a blatant piece of corporate cinematic piggybacking. Part of the joke is that the filmmakers are brazenly aware that today’s audiences couldn’t care less whether “The End of Oak Street” is an official “Jurassic” movie or not. The film seems to be saying: I’m a relentless, over-the-top junk dinosaur thriller. What more do you want?
“The End of Oak Street” is preposterous, but it’s also unrespectable fun. It allows the summer movie season to end with a gasp instead of a whimper. On a suburban cul-de-sac in the town of Flowervale, a storybook “normal” family, the Platts — Denise and Greg (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor) and their two teenagers, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) — wake up one day to discover prehistoric beasts and critters scampering through their neighborhood. At first, they see fast and feathery bird-raptors that look deceptively harmless (watch out: They will eat you). There are stegosauruses wandering through the woods (the woods, by the way, have become a primeval forest). There’s a snake that glides around like the prehistoric world’s largest condom — and yes, there’s a T. Rex, all rapid forward motion and giant jaws, in the tradition of the original 1993 “Jurassic Park” film.
Why is all this happening? We’ll get to the explanation in a moment, but rest assured: It’s entirely ludicrous. Yet “The End of Oak Street,” dumb as it often is, has a distinctive cheeseball flavor that starts with the quirky come-on of the film’s setting. It unfolds in 1982, but there’s no opening title to tell you that. We have to situate ourselves in the period atmosphere, and for a while that’s amusing to do, as we pick up on the songs in the background (“Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” “Turning Japanese”), the drab autumnal furniture, and the size and shape of the homes, which are smaller and brick-uglier than the suburban movie abodes we’re used to. And is that a Gremlin Greg is delivering pizzas in? (Talk about a dinosaur.) Brian and his buddies bike around like refugees from “Stand by Me,” with a tormenting bully in tow. And when the supernatural stuff starts to happen, with nighttime eruptions of glowing white light, it’s right out of a Spielberg movie of the period. (So are Denise and Greg’s marital troubles, which are edging into separation terrain.)
J.J. Abrams, one of the film’s producers, already cosplayed Spielberg once, in “Super 8.” In “The End of Oak Street,” the writer-director David Robert Mitchell (“It Follows”) nods to the analog Spielberg of the late ’70s and early ’80s, notably in a scene where McGregor’s Greg is running next to a fence. It’s enough to give you a touch of nostalgia for the days when a dinosaur thriller wasn’t all overscaled digital bombast.
“The End of Oak Street” is sometimes scary, more so than anything in the lumbering last few “Jurassic” sequels. And sometimes it’s a hoot. Intentionally or not? A bit of both, and that’s the film’s knowing but innocent stupido-kitsch dynamic. Denise, Greg, and the kids, along with the teenage neighbor (Jordan Alexa Davis) they come to the aid of (the two girls start flirting, which gives this pulp an au courant edge), don’t have much in the way of weaponry. There are shotguns, which prove less than effective when discharged into a dinosaur’s thick hide, and Brian has a bow and arrow he keeps firing and missing with. (Why not a slingshot?)
Mostly it’s run, shoot, and hide. But Mitchell stages the creature attacks with witty timing and skill, to the point that when Denise is fending off a T. rex on her porch, you almost believe it. Characters get eaten in a satisfying way, including one shocker I won’t spoil. (There’s also a bizarre moment when two feathery brontosauruses are seen humping against a house; that Denise wants to take a Polaroid of Greg in front of this is beyond nuts.)
The movie finally settles into being the glorified thunder-lizard knockoff it is. The Platts, like the family in the “Quiet Place” films, are in a world of beasts for a reason that makes even less sense the more that you think about it. They’ve passed through a time-warp wormhole, so they’re actually in the prehistoric world — but trapped on a two-mile wide circle of suburbia that’s been preserved. Can they get back? Maybe…by jumping into a shiny glowing globule that appears periodically. It’s not hard to imagine this nonsense having resulted from an executive telling his writer-director, “Figure it the fuck out, or we’ll get AI to script it.”
David Robert Mitchell was overpraised for “It Follows,” which was like a schlock “elevated” knockoff of “The Hidden,” and he got unfairly lambasted for his artsy but intriguing Lynchian rabbit-hole fantasia “Under the Silver Lake.” That movie put him in movie jail, and “The End of Oak Street” is how you get out of movie jail: by making a dinosaur thriller so blatant in its pandering it proves you’re willing to play the game. Yet Mitchell squeezes bits of B-movie humanity into the crevices, notably in his portrayal of the Platts’ teetering marriage. Hathaway and McGregor overact in tandem in a way that’s vivid and likable. As the film confirms, sometimes a T. rex attack can be the best couples’ therapy. But can we please start the fall movie season now?