What’s It About

A mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and transports a neighborhood to someplace unknown. The Platt family soon discovers that their very survival depends on sticking together as they navigate their now unrecognizable surroundings.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

The End of Oak Street wants you to feel warm and cozy about a certain slice of the American past. The neighborhood on screen is almost completely White (there is an older Black man and woman, and a young Black girl gets saved), and the families act like they walked off the set of an old sitcom rerun. From the opening minutes, the film signals exactly who it wants sitting in the audience, and honestly, it is not me. But that alone would not sink a movie. Plenty of films speak to one group and still manage to tell a story worth watching. The trouble here is that almost everything else falls apart too. Set in a Detroit suburb in 1982, the story follows Greg and Denise Platt, played by Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway, along with their teenage kids, Brian and Audrey, played by Christian Convery and Maisy Stella. Formally, at the manufacturing plant, Greg was let go weeks before but has kept the news from his spouse while financially making ends meet through his pizza-delivery gig. On the other hand, his wife Denise is secretly in the process of writing a book about a model wife’s dissatisfaction with her life in the suburbs (Yes, it’s about her, obviously). Usually unremarkable, one night the family finds itself and its neighborhood transported back two hundred million years to the prehistoric period where dinosaurs reside. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell clearly worships Steven Spielberg. He wants badly to build his own E.T. or Jurassic Park, and that hunger shows up in nearly every shot he frames. Mitchell proved real promise a few years back with the quiet horror film It Follows, so watching him copy someone else’s homework this closely feels like a letdown. Producer J.J. Abrams walked this same road before with Super 8 back in 2011, and this movie repeats that mistake almost beat for beat. Copying a master does not automatically make you one. The casting stops making sense once the story gets rolling. Hathaway and McGregor play a broke, blue-collar couple with no steady income, yet Hathaway looks like she stepped off a red carpet in every single scene. It is hard to believe a family in financial crisis when one parent still looks like she has a stylist on call. Hathaway has turned in strong work elsewhere this year, but here she overacts badly, snarling through scenes that call for something quieter. McGregor barely registers on screen at all. The teenage actors deliver their lines stiffly, like they memorized them the morning of filming. Somehow, the family dog gives the most believable performance in the entire movie. The script treats the Platts’ marriage like a problem with no real cause behind it. Denise wants out, and Greg grows angry that she wants out, but the film never shows us why their bond cracked beyond Greg working long hours and drinking too much. It reads less like something written by an adult who understands relationships and more like a teenager working through his own parents’ divorce on paper. The kids get thin backstories too. Brian is scared of another boy’s older brother after some past fight, and Audrey admires the astronomer Carl Sagan while drifting through a vague coming-of-age moment. Ultimately, you still don’t know who these people are. Common sense leaves fast once the dinosaurs show up. The Platts always manage to outrun creatures built with jaws that could, at least in Jurassic Park, damn near catch a jeep, snap them in half, and the near misses happen so often that they stop feeling scary and start feeling silly. We are told the neighborhood holds hundreds of houses, yet we only ever see people fleeing alone, with nobody organizing any real plan. The climate somehow turns tropical right around the house, with no explanation for why that heat would not spread out into the surrounding area. The scientific aspect of the story makes as much sense as the ridiculous claim made during the pandemic about using bleach to reduce the effects of the virus. A time-travel story doesn’t have to be scientifically sound, but it should be believable enough for the viewer not to question the plot during the chase scenes. However bad the scientists’ claims may have been, what bothers me even more is the fact that the film keeps rewarding those who choose to hide from others while punishing those who try to help. Denise clearly wants to do some unplanned heroic thing, while Greg chooses to hide and wait things out. The plot seems to favor Greg, who is constantly proven right in this strategy. Mix that with a family structure treated as the only correct one, and a mother’s wish for independence painted as foolish, and you get a movie quietly selling an old-fashioned, closed-off view of the world, wrapped in a fun-looking dinosaur suit. None of this means Mitchell lacks talent. Early scenes show suburban life with a light, patient touch, and the reveal of the changed neighborhood unfolds suddenly. A one-take sequence where an allosaurus corners the kids while the parents split up to distract it is genuinely well built, and a scene with a snake-like dinosaur sliding silently into the house creates real tension. Late in the film, the story stumbles into a genuinely surprising, Psycho-style twist involving one of the family members, only to immediately back away from it with a neat, unearned happy ending. That whiplash undercuts everything painfully built up before it. Mitchell can direct. He simply picked the wrong story to prove it on. By the end, The End of Oak Street looks like a movie from a distance, the way a fake Rolex looks real from across the street. Get close enough, though, and the cracks show up everywhere.

OUR RATING – A SUBURBAN 2