In my estimation, to make an enjoyable dinosaur movie there’s really only one thing you need to do: make sure you nail all the bits where the dinos go “chomp chomp.”
“The End of Oak Street” is filmmaker David Robert Mitchell’s crack at the genre, and the dinosaur action is more clever and amusing than any recent dregs of the “Jurassic Park” franchise. And that’s a very good thing, given that the script (also written by Mitchell) feels a tad underbaked.
“The End of Oak Street” is attempting to operate as a very subtle level of spoof (perhaps, sometimes, too subtle), and when it’s nailing that specific balance of arch, gleeful meanness, it’s a pretty entertaining watch. But when it leans too far into pastiche, copying the beats of blockbuster action movies (particularly, it will come as no surprise, those of Steven Spielberg) instead of leaning into Mitchell’s particular sensibilities, it loses its bite.
Before the dinosaurs show up and wreak havoc on Oak Street, we meet the Platts – a seemingly happy, typical 80s family, hiding darker secrets under their shiny facade. Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) have a strained marriage, to say the least – he just got laid off and is secretly working as a pizza delivery guy, and she is secretly writing a novel where the main character is a beleaguered wife who dreams about leaving her family. Daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) is obsessed with Carl Sagan and harboring a crush on the neighbor girl, while younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) is obsessed with his dog, and also harboring a crush on a different neighbor girl. Everyone has their secrets.
All that to say, when a wormhole transports the entire neighborhood of Oak Street millions of years into the past (the movie doesn’t want you to think too hard about the mechanics of this), the Platts aren’t exactly in prime, dinosaur-fighting shape. They do, however, figure out what’s happened to them remarkably quickly, and that exposition-laden scene is where the tone that “The End of Oak Street” is going for starts to gel. As the Platts run through their survival options, the film shuffles through a truly astonishing number of split diopter shots featuring different pairs of characters.
The split diopter shot count is so high and so noticeable – in that scene and in the rest of the film – that I can only assume it’s kind of a bit, over-accentuating the device’s ability to ramp up unease, using it so much that the tension somewhat dissipates. But the fact that I’m not sure is where “The End of Oak Street” falls flat. There’s a certain idiosyncratic sweet spot that the movie sometimes finds where it really feels like Mitchell is hitting his stride – whether that’s Ewan McGregor posing for a photo in front of two copulating dinosaurs, or a giant piece of dinosaur poop suddenly appearing in an annoying neighbor’s backyard. The actors feel more of a piece during these moments as well, particularly Hathaway, who goes full beast mode more than a few times in the film, eviscerating said annoying neighbor, her husband, or even her children with a sharp glare and un-minced words.
But whenever the film starts to lean into melodrama, that sharpness fades into something duller. In a scene deeply reminiscent of one in Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Denise and Greg have a screaming match in their bedroom while their children try to block out the sounds of their fighting. The shots of Audrey and Brian trying to ignore their parents are more than a little heart-wrenching, but the dialogue between Denise and Greg is almost laughable in its extravagance (when Greg exclaims that he read Denise’s book and he knows she wants to leave him, McGregor histrionic delivery is hard not to find funny). Here, we run into the same issue we did with the split diopter problem – is this supposed to be funny, or not? I think the answer is yes, but “The End of Oak Street” runs into that question most often when it paints with too broad a stroke.
That being said, Mitchell has a real talent for crafting multiple inventive and genuinely fun monster sequences, and those are the real calling card of “The End of Oak Street.” The dinosaurs themselves (feathers and all – we’re going with accuracy here!) look great, and each interaction they have with the family is better than the last – the crowning achievement of these involves a giant, eerily long worm-like creature slithering through the Platts’ house.
“The End of Oak Street” features one moment of pure, delightful shock that I won’t spoil for you here, but afterwards, its ending deflates with a bit of a whimper. The final stretch of the film is further emblematic of the “funny or not” issue – the way our heroes come back together after getting separated is deeply, deeply silly, but the script hasn’t given us enough to latch onto with its human characters for it to land with any amount of humor or pleasure. But, if you’re in it for the “chomp chomp” of it all, you won’t be disappointed.
