{"id":855644,"date":"2026-08-12T18:38:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T18:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/855644\/"},"modified":"2026-08-12T18:38:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T18:38:16","slug":"the-end-of-oak-street-review-loopier-and-in-a-way-better-jurassic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/855644\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of Oak Street Review: Loopier (and in a Way Better) ‘Jurassic’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cThe End of Oak Street<\/a>\u201d belongs to the genre I call the last-gasp-of-summer movie. A movie in this category has several characteristics, starting with the fact that it has to be released in the middle of August or later. Beyond that, a last-gasp-of-summer movie is trashy and obvious, it\u2019s usually ripped off from other movies, and it wears a shameless grin on its face about all of that. At the same time, it demands a certain size and scale \u2014\u00a0a straggling pretense of popcorn lavishness that marks it as a genuine final entry in the blockbuster season. (If it\u2019s any smaller, you know that the summer is already over.)<\/p>\n

\n\tIn \u201cThe End of Oak Street,\u201d a tranquil middle-class neighborhood gets attacked by dinosaurs, so it wouldn\u2019t be inaccurate to call the film \u201cJurassic World: Suburban Apocalypse.\u201d There have been seven \u201cJurassic\u201d movies, but to some of us it feels like there have been 27, and \u201cThe End of Oak Street\u201d might as well be the 28th. The film has nothing whatsoever to do with that fabled franchise, but rarely have I encountered such a blatant piece of corporate cinematic piggybacking. Part of the joke is that the filmmakers are brazenly aware that today\u2019s audiences couldn\u2019t care less whether \u201cThe End of Oak Street\u201d is an official \u201cJurassic\u201d movie or not. The film seems to be saying: I\u2019m a relentless, over-the-top junk dinosaur thriller. What more do you want?<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe End of Oak Street\u201d is preposterous, but it\u2019s also unrespectable fun. It allows the summer movie season to end with a gasp instead of a whimper. On a suburban cul-de-sac in the town of Flowervale, a storybook \u201cnormal\u201d family, the Platts \u2014 Denise and Greg (Anne Hathaway<\/a> and Ewan McGregor<\/a>) and their two teenagers, \u00a0Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) \u2014 wake up one day to discover prehistoric beasts and critters scampering through their neighborhood. At first, they see fast and feathery bird-raptors that look deceptively harmless (watch out: They will eat you). There are stegosauruses wandering through the woods (the woods, by the way, have become a primeval forest). There\u2019s a snake that glides around like the prehistoric world\u2019s largest condom \u2014 and yes, there\u2019s a T. Rex, all rapid forward motion and giant jaws, in the tradition of the original 1993 \u201cJurassic Park\u201d film.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhy is all this happening? We\u2019ll get to the explanation in a moment, but rest assured: It\u2019s entirely ludicrous. Yet \u201cThe End of Oak Street,\u201d dumb as it often is, has a distinctive cheeseball flavor that starts with the quirky come-on of the film\u2019s setting. It unfolds in 1982, but there\u2019s no opening title to tell you that. We have to situate ourselves in the period atmosphere, and for a while that\u2019s amusing to do, as we pick up on the songs in the background (\u201cHit Me With Your Best Shot,\u201d \u201cTurning Japanese\u201d), the drab autumnal furniture, and the size and shape of the homes, which are smaller and brick-uglier than the suburban movie abodes we\u2019re used to. And is that a Gremlin Greg is delivering pizzas in? (Talk about a dinosaur.) Brian and his buddies bike around like refugees from \u201cStand by Me,\u201d with a tormenting bully in tow. And when the supernatural stuff starts to happen, with nighttime eruptions of glowing white light, it\u2019s right out of a Spielberg movie of the period. (So are Denise and Greg\u2019s marital troubles, which are edging into separation terrain.)<\/p>\n

\n\tJ.J. Abrams, one of the film\u2019s producers, already cosplayed Spielberg once, in \u201cSuper 8.\u201d In \u201cThe End of Oak Street,\u201d the writer-director David Robert Mitchell (\u201cIt Follows\u201d) nods to the analog Spielberg of the late \u201970s and early \u201980s, notably in a scene where McGregor\u2019s Greg is running next to a fence. It\u2019s enough to give you a touch of nostalgia for the days when a dinosaur thriller wasn\u2019t all overscaled digital bombast.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe End of Oak Street\u201d is sometimes scary, more so than anything in the lumbering last few \u201cJurassic\u201d sequels. And sometimes it\u2019s a hoot. Intentionally or not? A bit of both, and that\u2019s the film\u2019s knowing but innocent stupido-kitsch dynamic. Denise, Greg, and the kids, along with the teenage neighbor (Jordan Alexa Davis) they come to the aid of (the two girls start flirting, which gives this pulp an au courant edge), don\u2019t have much in the way of weaponry. There are shotguns, which prove less than effective when discharged into a dinosaur\u2019s thick hide, and Brian has a bow and arrow he keeps firing and missing with. (Why not a slingshot?)<\/p>\n

\n\tMostly it\u2019s run, shoot, and hide. But Mitchell stages the creature attacks with witty timing and skill, to the point that when Denise is fending off a T. rex on her porch, you almost believe it. Characters get eaten in a satisfying way, including one shocker I won\u2019t spoil. (There\u2019s also a bizarre moment when two feathery brontosauruses are seen humping against a house; that Denise wants to take a Polaroid of Greg in front of this is beyond nuts.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie finally settles into being the glorified thunder-lizard knockoff it is. The Platts, like the family in the \u201cQuiet Place\u201d films, are in a world of beasts for a reason that makes even less sense the more that you think about it. They\u2019ve passed through a time-warp wormhole, so they\u2019re actually in the prehistoric world \u2014 but trapped on a two-mile wide circle of suburbia that\u2019s been preserved. Can they get back? Maybe\u2026by jumping into a shiny glowing globule that appears periodically. It\u2019s not hard to imagine this nonsense having resulted from an executive telling his writer-director, \u201cFigure it the fuck out, or we\u2019ll get AI to script it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDavid Robert Mitchell was overpraised for \u201cIt Follows,\u201d which was like a schlock \u201celevated\u201d knockoff of \u201cThe Hidden,\u201d and he got unfairly lambasted for his artsy but intriguing Lynchian rabbit-hole fantasia \u201cUnder the Silver Lake.\u201d That movie put him in movie jail, and \u201cThe End of Oak Street\u201d is how you get out of movie jail: by making a dinosaur thriller so blatant in its pandering it proves you\u2019re willing to play the game. Yet Mitchell squeezes bits of B-movie humanity into the crevices, notably in his portrayal of the Platts\u2019 teetering marriage. Hathaway and McGregor overact in tandem in a way that\u2019s vivid and likable. As the film confirms, sometimes a T. rex attack can be the best couples\u2019 therapy. But can we please start the fall movie season now?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe End of Oak Street\u201d belongs to the genre I call the last-gasp-of-summer movie. A movie in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":855645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[12944,49,48,75,39419,217183],"class_list":["post-855644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-anne-hathaway","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-ewan-mcgregor","tag-the-end-of-oak-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/855645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}