I know I sometimes come off as a movie snob (sorry! kinda!) looking down at blockbusters, annoyed by many lowest-common-denominator movies. But at my core, I’m a boy who used to smash Hot Wheels together, run around throwing Poké Balls at various household objects and constantly request to go to the Museum of Natural History to see the dinosaurs and marvel in their splendor.
I was, of course, a dinosaur kid, which is why it’s such a bummer that before this year there hasn’t been a good dinosaur movie since … 1998’s The Land Before Time? 1993’s dino masterpiece Jurassic Park? That section of Fantasia from 1940 in which a T-Rex and a Stegosaurus dueled?
It’s been rough sledding when it comes to Mesozoic reptiles, most notably last year’s reprehensible Jurassic World Rebirth, which was seemingly written by A.I. and/or some very high idiot. All of this is prelude to my review of David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street, which goes something like this: Hell yeah!
The movie (greatly anticipated by yours truly because of the director’s previous work in It Follows and Under the Silver Lake) is a Steven Spielberg ‘80s cul-de-sac pastiche of sorts, with a slightly nastier bent, centered on a “perfect” family led by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. The gist is that an idyllic neighborhood gets flung back in time, and we watch as things go awry from there.
It’s been compared to an extended Twilight Zone episode and is essentially a 100-minute action-adventure with a sci-fi swirl. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s fun! And weird! And kinda gross and mean-spirited. It has lofty ideas Trojan-horsed inside of the thrills and gets you out of the theater in less than two hours.
I have had few better theatrical experiences this year, and our crowd was on the edge of its seat—with one kind of annoying, kind of hysterical theatergoer trying to direct the characters.
Although the movie stars Anne Hathaway and dinosaurs—two things I love—it somehow appears as if Warner Bros. Discovery has been at a loss in promoting the film. Instead of pushing Hathaway and the compelling plot front and center, the studio has instead tried to use this as a test case for A.I. Which is a bummer and something they do here and there to minimal results.
I don’t understand how things have gotten so ominous that we need A.I. talking dogs to push a really fun action movie. Who’s watching this? And who’s seeing this junk and thinking, I need to go see a movie that has almost nothing to do with this?
Whatever. Moving on.
One of the main problems with Jurassic World Rebirth—other than the disastrous writing, the one-note characters and the bland world-building—was that the dinosaurs and the stakes were poorly thought out. There was no adventure and certainly no real reflection put into the fights and kills.
The End of Oak Street, on the other hand, feels fresh and has fun with the anticipation of it all. Like Jaws, but also like the best sci-fi horror, half of the fun is the uncertainty. The silence that can be shattered at any moment. Having a dino chase you through a field is less compelling than the horror-esque buzz of maybe having something sneaking behind you. Mitchell uses his It Follows bona fides to great effect and turns it all into an amusement park ride with actual stakes.
To be clear, there are few better opening scenes than this:
People die in The End of Oak Street. In terrible (sometimes shockingly funny) methods. And protagonists aren’t safe, in a way they would be in a franchise that’s aiming to bring its under-contract stars back. This is a one-off, and that makes it even more exciting.
I don’t want to sound too hyperbolic, because it’s not like this is my favorite film of the year, but it’s a hell of a time in the theater with Hathaway throwing 100 mph, along with an open-ended conclusion that gets more and more fucked up when you really let it linger.
After the sprawling mess (in the best way) that is Under the Silver Lake, it does feel like there’s a 150-minute version of The End of Oak Street somewhere on Mitchell’s cutting-room floor that I’d love to see. And yet, unlike the usual studio-destroyed dreck, I’m content with what we’ve got: An entertaining dino thriller with gnarly sequences, a hysterical missed jump and enough to chew on to satiate a Coelophysis.
Also, there’s this thing, which gets five stars on its own from me: