The End of Oak Street

THE END OF OAK STREET   *1/2

David Robert Mitchell

2026

IDEA:  A family of four fights to survive rampaging dinosaurs after their Michigan suburb is transported back to the Mesozoic Era. 

BLURB:  The End of Oak Street has the brainlessness of a bad B movie and the wateriness of something that’s been focus-grouped and re-rewritten into mush. It contains such sterling dialogue as “Maybe it will take us home! To our time!” and “Is that a fucking dinosaur?,” the latter of which has admittedly comedic intent but sits awkwardly in a movie that only fitfully commits to comedy, let alone the drama at its center. That such a warmed-over Syfy story attracted a big Hollywood budget and a pair of A-listers proves to be among its less baffling qualities. This is a movie that begins with the ripe premise of prehistoric creatures besieging a suburb and goes nowhere with it beyond a generic survival scenario. Some perfunctory domestic strife suggests the dinosaur mayhem as a corollary or parallel, but Mitchell rarely does anything interesting with his creatures to enrich subtext; they are merely implacable predators to be evaded and/or shot with the surprising number of shotguns owned by this neighborhood’s old-lady population. The characters are as bare-bones as the world they inhabit and as dimly motivated as the visuals, which contain an amount of split-diopter shots so gratuitous even Brian De Palma would likely protest. Mouth agape, lines spoken in monotone, Ewan McGregor seems to want to be anywhere else, and Anne Hathaway’s versatility is wasted on a role that calls for her to mostly tremble, cry, and scream (ditto the poor kids). Michael Giacchino’s boisterous score emerges as the most heroic thing from a film that, ironically, has many teeth but no bite.