Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor star as parents trying to protect their family when prehistoric predators invade their neighborhood.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Billed as “From Producer J.J. Abrams and the Director of ‘It Follows,’” the not-very-cleverly-titled, sub-Spielbergian entry “The End of Oak Street” is shamelessly mediocre. Producer-director Abrams has been behind some entertaining films. But instead of being an innovator, he’s become a maker of genre films, TV series, and reboots and sequels, especially involving the “big three”: “Mission: Impossible,” “Star Wars,” and “Star Trek.” “The End of Oak Street” writer-director David Robert Mitchell made a big splash with the 2014 terrifying genre film “It Follows,” followed by the ambitious, underappreciated “Chinatown”-meets-“Inherent Vice” 2016 effort “Under the Silver Lake.”
After eight years of nothing, I’m sure Mitchell was more than happy to helm this subdivision of Spielberg’s groundbreaking CGI extravaganza “Jurassic Park” (1993).
Welcome to Oak Street, where “the monsters are due,” to paraphrase the title of a famous episode of TV’s “The Twilight Zone.” It’s 1982, and 40-something Greg and Denise Platt barely hold a marriage together. He’s delivering pizzas in his beater car to keep the family’s budget afloat. Their starry-eyed, adolescent daughter Audrey (music phenom Maisy Stella) is into stargazing and Carl Sagan. Sitting on the family roof, she’s reading “First on the Moon.” Their slightly younger son Brian (Christian Convery, “Frankenstein”) sports a bow and arrow and faces the wrath of the older (and bigger) brother of a boy he inadvertently injured. Brian and his buddies tool around their suburban neighborhood on beat-up bikes, of course. We hear Pat Benatar belting “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” and a snippet of a radio report of “ripples in space.” These days, that’s enough to justify a giant pile of dinosaur poo in the annoying neighbor’s yard and the 200 million-year-old tree in another’s garden.
Soon, a prehistoric jungle has sprung up all around and inside Oak Street, and big bird-beaked dinos chase down neighborhood residents and chow down on them. The Platts, meanwhile, are holed up in their boarded-up house without electricity or water. What is happening? Well, audiences don’t care as long as people are getting eaten by dinosaurs, and yes, there are bigger ones waiting in the wings to make their entrances. Anyone wondering why the CG effects are so bad in 2026 is just a spoilsport.
Yes, we run the gamut of Spielbergian family connections: resentment, affection, dreams, nightmares, bravery in the face of danger, self-sacrifice. We know the drill. But why are these human hors d’ouerves for flesh-eating giants caught off guard so many times? Too many times, monsters sneak up on the Platts simply because they are not paying attention. The brave Denise, who for some reason is depicted as secretly banging out pages of a novel in the family basement at night, loses a shotgun and a rifle in the course of the action. Pizza delivery person Greg swings a mean sledgehammer. Greg and Denise join forces, bond and rekindle the flame to search for their wayward children. Somehow, the family dog Starbuck (egregious product placement?) avoids getting gulped again and again.
Real-life Wonder Woman Hathaway is burning up screens as Penelope in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and, more recently, in the disappointing “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and the merely inscrutable “Mother Mary.” And she’s pregnant. A role like Denise Platt isn’t much of a challenge for her. But why should Emily Blunt get all the end-of-the-world action?
Scotsman McGregor seems to focus hard on not letting the burr out (but he does). It’s hard to think of him as an all-American father figure. But he and Hathaway are both fine. Cinematographer Mike Gioulakis (“Us”) is a little too enamored of Sergio Leone’s famous giant heads. Composer Michael Giacchino (“Jurassic World”) apparently has been required to sound like John Williams again. Where did the dinosaurs on Oak Street come from? The answer involves cosmic “time shifts” and an apparition resembling a giant disco ball. The more they try to explain it, the more ridiculous it sounds. The science in “The End of Oak Street” is genuinely pathetic beside the emerging genetic engineering that inspired Michael Crichton to write his best-selling 1990 novel “Jurassic Park.” Beware of one of the most shamelessly predictable endings of the year. What a world.
‘The End of Oak Street’
Rating: PG-13, bloody violence, violent content, suggestive language, profanity
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella
Writer-Director: David Robert Mitchell
Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters
Grade: B-
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