‘The End of Oak Street’ Review: Dinosaur Movie Is Toothless

Hey guys? I think I’ve got to move out of the suburbs. It’s getting scary out here. We had a nightmare on Elm Street, monsters are due on Maple Street, and that big-ass bird on Sesame Street has been looking at me funny. Don’t even get me started on the end of Oak Street. Once you get velociraptors in your backyard, it’s damn near impossible to get ‘em out.

Ever since middle class Americans got it into their heads that white picket fences kept “undesirables” at bay, horror filmmakers have loved proving them wrong. It’s fun to fill these affluent, isolationist neighborhoods with man-eating beasts, paranoid delusions and other metaphors for suburban hypocrisy. That’s what these films are, after all. Whatever turns Pleasantville into Unpleasantville speaks to a hidden rot at the core of the so-called “American Dream.” The monsters were inside the house all along.

“The End of Oak Street” has no shortage of man-eating beasts but it’s so invested in watching dinosaurs kill your friends and neighbors that it gives up on having any point. It doesn’t matter how the Platt family gets surrounded by giant carnivorous creatures because nothing in the movie matters. It sets up a story about finding strength and independence outside of traditional social roles but then it abandons that idea and backtracks into safe, boring territory. In the end it is, to quote another suburban family frequently beset by weirdness, “just a bunch of stuff that happened.”

Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor star as Denise and Greg Platt. They put on a good front for their neighbors and their two kids but they’re clearly falling apart. Greg is so financially strapped he’s delivering pizzas to make extra money. Denise is writing a novel about how she is suffocating in a loveless, miserable marriage with no hope for a better tomorrow. She insists it’s just a story and it doesn’t reflect her real life but sure, Denise. It’s only a story. And “Peyton Place” was only a teen soap opera.

A few solar flares later and suddenly the Platts, along with everyone else in their neighborhood, wake up in the prehistoric era, surrounded by hungry dinosaurs. “The End of Oak Street” earns bonus points for scientifically-accurate dinos with fluffy feathers. But the film begins in the early 1980s and scientists didn’t popularize the theory that dinosaurs had feathers until the 2000s, and nobody seems surprised that every picture of dinosaurs they ever saw was wrong. Even the Platts’ daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), whose only character trait is “she loves science,” doesn’t think it’s interesting. This isn’t a serious critique, but it’s kind of distracting and it’s my review so I get to mention it.

The rest of “The End of Oak Street” is dinosaur mayhem, with occasional, brief breaks from dinosaur mayhem. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell sure does love his dinosaur mayhem. The film gets pretty gory for a PG-13 release, which is fitting for a film set in the 1980s and inspired by the sci-fi/horror films of the time. “Poltergeist” had a PG rating and somebody rips their face off on camera. “The End of Oak Street” doesn’t go that far but let’s just say if you’re visiting the Platt family this weekend, don’t get too attached to your limbs.

Mitchell’s screenplay introduces a gaggle of neighbors but they’re not people, they’re dinosaur food. Nobody except the Platts have anything resembling an inner life. Everyone else gets one superficial characteristic a piece and they’re lucky to have that. There’s an annoying neighbor who sure is annoying. There’s an angry kid who sure is angry, who physically attacks the Platts’ son Brian (Christian Convery) even when there are monsters all around them. Priorities, kid. Priorities.

You might think the filmmaker behind “It Follows,” one of the most subtextually loaded and terrifying horror movies of the 21st century, would use the dinosaur attacks as a way to explore the expanding rift between Greg and Denise. Instead they snipe at each other and reveal a few banal secrets. All that set-up for serious interpersonal conflict goes to waste. The film is introduced as a story about Denise’s repressed longing for freedom. Eventually it de-evolves into unconvincing, generic nuclear family propaganda. 

There are no horrors in “The End of Oak Street’s” suburbia which are exposed by the sudden influx of danger. Any relationships that are permanently changed are only changed because everybody decided to live up to their old school gender roles, even if it makes no sense that they’d want to. The dinosaurs are just interlopers, a stand-in for all the “undesirables” the neighborhood’s white picket fences were invented to keep out. A shallow threat in a shallow story which tries to redeem itself at the last minute with an anticlimactic finale and an unconvincing, conformist message. The film confuses surviving a life-threatening ordeal with confronting the things that truly scare us. It doesn’t matter who lives because nobody is meaningfully saved.

If all you want to do is watch Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor fight dinosaurs, “The End of Oak Street” is the place to go. But if that’s all you want, why are you reading film criticism? We’re here to open this movie up and see what makes it tick, and there’s very little to discover beneath the superficial violence. There’s a heart in here somewhere, but it’s hard to find, and it only pumps blood for the purpose of looking gnarly.