The End of Oak Street is a Steven Spielberg pastiche made by someone who seems to hate the style and genre with all their heart. It's a mean-spirited, tonally unfocused mess that can't decide what kind of film it wants to be.
The setup is intriguing in a 1930s sci-fi kind of way. What if, one day, without warning, your entire street was transported to a prehistoric era, where dinosaurs still roamed the planet? How would you survive, and who would you survive with?
For the Platt family, those answers don't come as easily as one might expect. Despite appearances, their domestic bliss is tearing apart at the seams. Greg (Ewan McGregor) is a distant, alcoholic man-child. Denise (Anne Hathaway) writes books about escaping her suffocating life and leaving her family behind. Audrey (Maisy Stella) is more interested in the stars than she is in life on the ground. The youngest, Brian (Christian Convery), is acting out in rebellion, smoking and attacking other children.
As the world around them suddenly comes untethered, they're forced to work together to survive in a horrific situation none of them can understand. It's the kind of premise that Spielberg has built his career on – an exploration of the American family unit as it faces the unimaginable.
Unlike Spielberg, writer/director David Robert Mitchell seems wholly uninterested in his characters. As a result, they're all unlikeable caricatures, some even bordering on offensive as End of Oak Street half-heartedly attempts to appear progressive in its dynamics. A better, more assured satire could have explored the patriarchal elements that define disaster and survival films, but this isn't it.
For example, watch how Mitchell frames the brutal death of a schlubby neighbor as a gag. He's presented as the bad guy because he doesn't want the Platts' dog to destroy his yard. Out of options, he exasperatedly threatens to shoot it the next time this happens. In response, Hathaway says she'll burn his house down. When he dies, it's a comeuppance for a big meanie, but it feels wrong. Similarly, we're told that Brian intentionally broke another kid's arm, and their brother wants revenge. When they finally encounter one another, the brother is painted as an unhinged bully, and their fate is left to bleak guesswork.
At this point, I began to wonder if maybe End of Oak Street is a satire; a dark and twisted alternative vision of Amblin's picture-perfect American utopias. But the film never settles on a tone that would put it one way or another. At times, it plays up the big family spectacle, riffing on far better Spielberg movies in the process. At others, it distances itself from the genre entirely, only to walk back every bold decision it makes to ensure nobody leaves the theater unhappy. If you squint and look at it askew, you could argue that it's a pitch-black comedy. But perhaps that's giving it too much credit.
In the process, we get a lot of musical stingers from the Jurassic Park films, an extended version of the War of the Worlds basement sequence, and multiple instances where the dinosaurs literally sneak up on our heroes in broad daylight. It's preposterous, but it's never fun enough to warrant that silliness. At times, there's an element of M. Night Shyamalan's equally audacious throwback horror, The Happening, which stumbles with the same tonal issues as this one.
In one of the most maddening examples, the film goes from dinosaur fucking to brutal death to a wide shot of one dino eating an ice cream van while another droopily shits over a park. Even crash test dummies don't experience this kind of whiplash.
It's thanks to Anne Hathaway that any of this works, even in small doses. By now, she has proven herself capable of any genre regardless of style and scope, and she's tremendous as the conflicted mother trying to keep her family alive. It's just a shame the film robs her of a satisfying character arc. Instead, it enforces some deeply troubling conservative values that never feel justified or earned.
McGregor does what he can with a nothing part that requires him to speak only in declarative exposition and stare at things off-screen. In the one moment the film jolts to life, he and Hathaway have a brutal argument in the midst of the apocalypse, and it's far more upsetting and immediate than any of the CGI effects around them.
End of Oak Street has its moments, and if the image of Hathaway wielding a rifle against a rogue T-Rex while wearing vintage clothing is enough to ensure a good time, chances are this will satisfy a late-summer popcorn urge. But after a solidly exciting first twenty minutes, the heavy riffing from Spielberg and Richard Donner, combined with the mean and out-of-place humor, got to me. I fell off the rollercoaster and never found my way back on.
And once I started to think about all the things nagging at me in the film, there was no going back. The End of Oak Street does not hold up against even a modicum of scrutiny. Its vibes might be immaculate, but they're borrowed from others, and the originals are always better.
