Review: THE END OF OAK STREET is a Bonkers Dinosaur Adventure That Goes Completely Off the Rails, and I Had a Blast
I went into director David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street knowing the basic setup, but I wasn’t prepared for just how completely bonkers this movie would get.
What starts as a strange sci-fi story involving an ordinary 1980s suburban neighborhood and a prehistoric problem quickly grows into something much weirder, nastier, funnier, and more unpredictable than I expected. Mitchell takes a premise that already sounds crazy and keeps finding new ways to have fun with it, and I was happily along for the ride.
I had such a damn good time with this movie. The End of Oak Street isn’t perfect, and there are a few things that frustrated me, but none of that came close to overpowering how entertaining the whole experience was.
This is a fast, wonderfully ridiculous 99-minute summer popcorn flick that knows exactly how much fun there is in dropping dinosaurs into suburbia and letting all hell break loose. It made me laugh, it made me cringe, and there were several moments that genuinely caught me off guard.
More importantly, it gave me things involving dinosaurs that I’ve never seen in a movie before, things I never thought I’d see, and that's pretty freaking impressive at this point.
The story centers on the Platt family, led by Denise and Greg, played by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. They're already dealing with problems at home when their ordinary suburban existence gets turned completely upside down.
Their kids Audrey and Brian, played by Maisy Stella and Christian Convery, are along for the increasingly insane ride, and before long the family has much bigger things to worry about than whatever issues were brewing between them.
That's really all you need to know.
This is one of those movies where I think knowing less makes it more fun. Mitchell gradually introduces the weirdness and allows the situation to become increasingly ridiculous from there.
The premise gives him a fantastic playground to work with because there's something inherently funny, creepy, and awesome about seeing prehistoric creatures invade such an aggressively normal suburban environment.
Dinosaurs running around a prehistoric jungle? Sure. That's where dinosaurs belong. Dinosaurs causing havoc around houses, lawns, neighborhood streets, and other familiar spaces? Now we're having some fun!
I've seen The End of Oak Street compared to Jurassic Park, which was inevitable because apparently any movie containing dinosaurs has to be measured against Jurassic Park. I get why the comparison happens, but I don't think it's particularly useful here.
This isn't trying to be another Jurassic Park. This movie is doing something much stranger and more absurd with the concept, mixing sci-fi, creature-feature horror, family drama, comedy, and old-school summer adventure into its own wonderfully bizarre concoction.
What I especially enjoyed is that the movie isn't afraid to get weird with its prehistoric world. The movie clearly wasn't interested in giving us the same collection of dinosaur encounters we've watched countless times before.
There are familiar creatures, sure, but there are also some truly bizarre surprises that I'm not going to ruin. Part of the pleasure is watching the movie introduce some new prehistoric insanity and thinking, “Okay, we're doing this now. Sure. Why the hell not?”
That's where The End of Oak Street really won me over. It commits to the craziness. There are moments in this movie involving dinosaurs that I genuinely never thought I'd see on a big screen, and I mean that in the best possible way.
Mitchell keeps playing around with the possibilities of the premise instead of treating the dinosaurs as nothing more than monsters that occasionally show up to chase people.
Sometimes they're terrifying, sometimes they're strange, sometimes they're funny, and sometimes the movie gets so absurd that all I could do was laugh and enjoy whatever madness Mitchell had cooked up.
It's also considerably more violent than I expected. This isn't a sanitized dinosaur adventure where every gruesome death conveniently happens outside the frame. When things get nasty,
Mitchell lets them get nasty, and that creature-feature brutality gives the movie an extra kick. I don't want to describe any of the specific attacks because they're much more fun when you don't know they're coming, but there were definitely moments that got a strong reaction out of me and the audience, moments that were shocking!
I loved that the movie was willing to go there. The violence helps establish that these creatures aren't simply cool attractions wandering through the neighborhood.
They're dangerous animals, and when humans get in their way, things can get ugly very quickly. That gives the movie enough genuine danger to keep the tension alive even when everything surrounding it becomes completely ridiculous.
The tonal juggling act shouldn't work as well as it does. The End of Oak Street can bounce from family drama to comedy to horror to full-blown prehistoric mayhem without completely losing itself.
A lot of that comes down to Mitchell understanding that the characters have to take their situation seriously even when the movie itself is having a ridiculous amount of fun with it. The humor doesn't constantly undercut the danger, and the emotional material doesn't smother the adventure.
The cast plays a big role in pulling that off. Hathaway is fantastic as Denise and really goes for it. She gets to be scared, angry, frustrated, protective, overwhelmed, and occasionally completely frantic, but she also gives the character enough emotional weight that Denise never becomes simply another person running away from dinosaurs. Hathaway understands the heightened nature of the movie while still grounding her performance in something recognizably human.
McGregor is also great as Greg, and I really enjoyed watching him and Hathaway together. They make the strained family dynamic believable enough that I actually cared about these people beyond whether they were going to survive their latest prehistoric encounter.
Stella and Convery are strong as well, and together the four of them feel like an actual family rather than a collection of characters assembled specifically to become dinosaur food.
That family element ended up being more important to my enjoyment of the movie than I expected. Underneath all the creature attacks and insanity, The End of Oak Street is ultimately about people who already have trouble communicating being thrown into an impossible situation together.
The movie doesn't beat us over the head with that idea, but it gives the craziness an emotional foundation. The dinosaurs may be the reason we're buying the ticket, but the Platts give us a reason to care about what happens between all the chaos.
Mitchell's direction is another big part of why the movie works. Fans of It Follows will recognize his ability to make suburban spaces feel strange and threatening, and that sensibility fits this material incredibly well.
He finds creative ways to stage the action and uses the neighborhood itself as part of the spectacle. There are some terrific camera choices throughout the film, along with an extended chase sequence that I thought was absolutely thrilling.
I also appreciated that Mitchell doesn't feel compelled to stop the movie every few minutes to explain everything. There's enough information to give us an idea of what might be happening, but the film isn't interested in drowning its wonderfully ridiculous premise in exposition.
Something impossible has happened, everybody is trapped in it, and now they have to deal with the consequences. That's all I needed. Sometimes explaining every detail of a bizarre situation only makes it less interesting.
Michael Giacchino also gets in on the fun with a score that embraces the movie's old-school summer adventure energy. It complements the 1980s setting and helps give the film that big-screen popcorn spirit without making the whole thing feel like an imitation of something we've already seen.
That's an important distinction because while you can certainly spot some of the influences Mitchell is playing with, the movie still manages to develop its own strange personality.
There are also these wonderfully odd little character moments sprinkled throughout the madness that keep the film from becoming nothing but people screaming and running from prehistoric creatures.
I liked those touches because they give the movie some breathing room and allow its sense of humor to come through naturally. Mitchell understands how ridiculous the situation is, but he doesn't spend the entire movie elbowing the audience and making jokes about it. The absurdity is already right there on the screen. He doesn't need to explain why it's funny.
My biggest issue with the film comes down to something that has always driven me crazy in movies: characters making spectacularly stupid decisions because the story needs them to.
There comes a major point in The End of Oak Street where the story pivots when somebody makes a choice that had me internally screaming, “What the hell are you doing?!” I'm not going to tell you who does it, what they do, or what happens, but it needs to happen to propel the story forward.
I completely understand why the screenplay needs the decision to happen because it sends the story barreling toward the insane finale, but understanding the mechanics of the screenplay didn't make the character seem any less stupid.
This is always tricky because people obviously make bad decisions when they're scared, confused, and under pressure. I don't need movie characters to behave like perfectly logical survival machines. That's boring too.
But there's a point where a decision becomes so dumb that I start seeing the writer standing behind the character pushing them toward the next plot point. That's what happened here. It annoyed me, and I wish Mitchell had found a more natural way of getting the story where it needed to go.
At the same time, what comes after that decision is so entertaining that I eventually stopped being mad about it and surrendered to the craziness again.
The visual effects aren't completely consistent either. That's always going to be one of the challenges with a movie that is effects-heavy as this with digital prehistoric creatures. The weaker effects occasionally stood out, but they never pulled me out of the movie long enough to kill the fun.
And I really liked how The End of Oak Street brings everything home. I'm obviously not going anywhere near the specifics because the final act contains some of the movie's biggest and craziest surprises, but after all the chaos and prehistoric insanity, I thought Mitchell found a satisfying way to land the story.
It works especially well because the movie has spent so much time getting us invested in the Platt family and the baggage they've been carrying around. After everything they're put through, I appreciated where the story ultimately leaves these characters. The ending gives the movie an emotional payoff that feels earned while still fitting the crazy adventure that got us there.
For all the issues I had along the way, The End of Oak Street entertained the hell out of me. It's funny, nasty, wonderfully weird, and far more unhinged than I expected it to be.
Just when it seems to have exhausted the possibilities of the dinosaur insanity, it finds another strange idea to unleash. I loved the experience of watching the madness unfolded, the movie kept surprising me with visuals, situations, and prehistoric shenanigans I genuinely hadn't seen before.
There's something incredibly fun about watching a filmmaker get this much room to play around with a crazy premise. Mitchell takes advantage of it, but the movie doesn't become a bloated mess in the process.
At 99 minutes, it gets in, causes an outrageous amount of prehistoric destruction, and gets out. I appreciate that. It came to entertain me with a dysfunctional suburban family and a bunch of vicious dinosaurs, and it accomplished that mission rather spectacularly.
More than anything, I appreciate that The End of Oak Street has a personality of its own. This could have easily been another generic dinosaur movie assembled from familiar pieces, but Mitchell makes something much stranger.
It's funny without turning every scene into a punchline, gruesome without becoming exhausting, emotional without drowning the adventure in melodrama, and ridiculous without ever seeming embarrassed by how ridiculous it is.
That's exactly the kind of summer popcorn movie I want. Give me something playful. Give me something weird. Give me a filmmaker willing to take a familiar ingredient like dinosaurs and find some completely unexpected ways to screw around with it.
The End of Oak Street gave me all of that, along with strong performances, some great creature mayhem, genuine laughs, nasty surprises, and several moments that made me wonder how the hell Mitchell convinced the studio to let him put this stuff on screen.
I think audiences are going to have a blast with this one, especially if they can avoid having its crazier moments spoiled beforehand. Forget about trying to fit it into the Jurassic Park box and just let the movie drag you into its wonderfully bizarre prehistoric suburban nightmare.
The End of Oak Street isn't flawless, but I don't need a movie like this to be flawless. I need it to entertain me, surprise me, give me characters I enjoy spending time with, and make good on the glorious promise of dinosaurs wreaking havoc in suburbia. It does all of that while getting considerably weirder and crazier than I expected.
I had a freaking blast with it.