REVIEW: “The End Of Oak Street”
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
For a while, The End of Oak Street really does feel like director David Robert Mitchell is onto something special. He has all the right pieces on the table: a family on the verge of falling apart, a strange cosmic mystery, prehistoric beasts running wild, and that Amblin-style feel that makes even the most outlandish stories feel perfectly believable. At first, it seems like he has built the kind of big, crowd-pleasing adventure that will leave people walking out of the theater smiling from ear to ear.
But somewhere along the way, it becomes clear that Mitchell never quite figures out how to turn those pieces into a complete movie. It’s not a total disaster, and it’s original enough that it’s never boring. Thanks to fun scenes here and there, clever ideas, and even a few flashes of genuine cinematic magic. Still, the film keeps reaching for that big, nostalgic high and lands just shy of it. Instead of truly capturing the spirit of the ’80s classics it's chasing, The End of Oak Street spends almost two hours searching for that elusive spark and never quite catches it.
Written and directed by Mitchell, who returns to the director’s chair seven years after his last movie (2019’s Under The Silver Lake), set in 1982, the movie centers on the Platt family. Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway) live on the titular Michigan street, struggling to hold together a marriage that’s clearly seen better days, while raising their teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) and young son Brian (Christian Convery). But their everyday problems suddenly feel a lot smaller one night, when a mysterious cosmic event hurtles Oak Street and seemingly everyone living on it into the prehistoric era.
Owing much to the films that Steven Spielberg either produced or directed through his Amblin Entertainment in the ‘80s, Mitchell makes no effort to hide Spielberg’s influence. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as he isn’t the first modern director to try and recapture the feel of those movies in recent memory, and given that movies in general have been borrowing from Spielberg for decades. The real problem, though, is that The End of Oak Street hardly ever captures the sense of wonder or genuine emotion that made those movies work and endure all these years later. Instead, for most of the runtime, it feels like an expensively made, pale imitation of those classic films.
That is what makes the movie so frustrating, because Mitchell once looked like a filmmaker with talent to spare after 2015’s It Follows. To his credit, he still knows how to build scenes filled with tension, and with this movie, he shows a real eye for staging elaborate action sequences. In fact, you can feel the craft in those moments, and it makes you wish the whole movie worked better. Where it falls short is the script, which feels like it needed a few more drafts, and in the way Mitchell’s overall vision seems to have gotten crowded out. There are clear signs of reshoots and studio tinkering throughout, with some scenes and story beats inserted so awkwardly that they never quite fit with the rest of the movie. Since the film was first shot back in 2024, it’s not hard to see why the final cut feels like something that was worked on for far too long.
As for the dinosaurs themselves, they’re impressive enough, but after decades of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies, simply putting a convincing dinosaur onscreen isn’t much of an accomplishment anymore. The real challenge is giving those creatures something interesting to do, and too often they get lost in the visual effects spectacle rather than feeling like genuinely terrifying creatures invading this family’s world. Credit where it’s due, though: Mitchell and his VFX crew deserve praise for depicting these dinosaurs more realistically than we’ve seen before, including giving them feathers and fur. And for finally bringing one of the great, real prehistoric creatures to the big screen for the first time: the massive Titanoboa.
The cast fares slightly better. McGregor and Hathaway are reliably solid performers, and while neither is doing particularly memorable work here, they both fully commit to the material. That commitment goes a long way toward selling the movie’s outlandish premise and the increasingly ridiculous situations their characters find themselves in. They also convincingly navigate the ups and downs of Greg and Denise’s strained relationship, giving the audience a reason to care about them even when the script never digs deep enough to make the family drama especially moving. Stella and Convery are perfectly fine as the kids, but they’re let down by thinly written characters. More often than not, they feel less like real people and more like they’re there solely to round out the trademark “Spielberg” family.
The End of Oak Street isn't a terrible movie; it's just a frustrating one. It's competently made, occasionally fun and exciting, and built around a genuinely great high-concept premise. But for a movie about an ordinary suburban neighborhood suddenly thrust into a world of real dinosaurs, "competent" feels like a backhanded compliment. This should be a movie that leaned much harder into the strangeness, terror, and possibilities of its premise, resulting in a wild and memorable ride. Instead, it feels like just another trip down a very familiar street.
The End Of Oak Street is currently playing in wide release.