If The End of Oak Street was just 100 minutes of Ewan McGregor smashing dinosaurs with a sledgehammer, it would be pretty great. If you then added in Anne Hathaway blasting at them with a massive shotgun too, things get taken up a notch. And when those dinosaurs are not in a theme park, but in a familiar-looking 1980s neighborhood because of time travel, well, that’s incredibly random, but we are all in.
Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows), The End of Oak Street is all of that and much more. It’s surprising, it’s exciting, it’s heartfelt and dramatic. It also, at times, struggles to find the right balance between its suburban setting and massive action beats. And yet, that tiny flaw and others never change the fact that it’s a well-made, entertaining dino-adventure that feels like it could’ve been released during the era in which it’s set. Set during the summer of 1982, The End of Oak Street centers on the Platt family. There’s the mother, Denise (Hathaway), father Greg (McGregor), older daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), son Brian (Christian Convery), and a Battlestar Galactica-named dog, Starbuck. They’re a pretty typical family. Audrey doesn’t quite fit in, Brian gets into a lot of trouble, Greg is out of work, and Denise struggles to hold the whole thing together while also harboring her own secrets. They’ve all got issues. There are some complex dynamics between them, but hey, they love each other. And it’s the 1980s, so they’ve got cassette tapes, rotary telephones, terrible fashion, and all that good stuff. Basically, it feels like it’s set in a shared universe with all of the Amblin films of the 1980s, along with Stranger Things, which has the same DNA. © Warner Bros. Mitchell spends a healthy amount of the film’s surprisingly short runtime setting up those characters and their world. This delays the dinos a bit, but also gives the movie its own unique flair. He wants us to understand this place and these people before that place travels back in time a few million years and gets dropped in the middle of a dinosaur-filled ecosystem. Which, even just writing it, sounds pretty weird, and the movie never quite explains it in a wholly satisfying way. But, somehow, everything is grounded enough that it fits and you go with it.
