So you like dinosaur movies but you’re a bit disillusioned by the creative ennui of the Jurassic World series and you’d rather go extinct than watch one of the endless stream of straight to streaming/DVD rip-offs with titles like Jurassic Games, Jurassic Planet and Jurassic Hunt (Steady – Ed)? We feel your pain.
But brave heart – David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street is here to restore your faith in cinematic creature features. While it’s undoubtedly big and barmy (and quite bonkers), it’s also gloriously entertaining and quite possibly the best dinosaur delight since 1993’s Jurassic Park itself. Seriously.
It’s 1982 and the Platt family live in one of those wholesome, always sunny neighbourhoods so beloved of 1980s Spielberg and, more recently, Stranger Things (although here we’re not exactly in Hawkins, more like Roar-kins…sorry). All is not well with this nuclear unit though: mum Denise (Anne Hathaway) is frustrated and unfulfilled and has secretly written a work of fiction that reflects her own disillusionment; dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) is feckless and directionless and has had to resort to bit-money jobs to help support the family; and their two teen kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) are dealing with their own adolescence woes and are worried that their parents are heading for divorce.
But all their familial concerns are set aside when, after a couple of nights of strange lights illuminating the sky, the family discover that the whole neighbourhood has somehow been transported back in time and found itself deposited in the middle of a primeval jungle. Inevitably, vicious prehistoric predators are now on the loose, and as locals and neighbours succumb to the jaws of the most dangerous creatures to ever walk the Earth, the family have to work together to stay alive.
The End of Oak Street is an absolute blast, because that’s all it was ever intended to be. Dinosaurs in suburbia is an irresistible premise and the film does a lot with it. After a slow-burn first half-hour that sets up our characters and their dynamic, we’re pitched into a non-stop, breathless adventure romp that is intentionally Spielbergian but without the sickly saccharine that has so often bedevilled even his best-loved movies.
This is full of genuine peril, real surprises, and a few laughs, and the dinosaur violence is nasty and brutal and surprisingly graphic. There are a handful of edge-of-the-seat set pieces involving prehistoric alligators, pterodactyls, raptor-type things, and, of course, yer actual T Rex – the dinosaurs are all, incidentally, anatomically correct with fur and feathers.
Hathaway leads the charge as the resourceful Denise, and while McGregor’s Greg, dodgy American accent and all, occasionally appears weak-willed and inferior to his more dynamic wife, he steps up to the plate when he has to and does his best to protect his brood. There are a couple of missteps – Brian’s gang of friends are never seen again after a sequence that establishes their existence, a bullying storyline involving Brian goes nowhere, and the explanation for the phenomenon that has taken Oak Street and its environs back in time is a bit “will this do?” although it’s clearly open-ended and ambiguous enough to allow for a sequel.
But ultimately, this is just great madcap fun as a one-and-done end-of-summer-season mid-level blockbuster that does everything and more promised by its tantalising trailers. It is, dare we suggest, monstrously good.
THE END OF OAK STREET is in cinemas now.
