Producers: J.J. Abrams, Hannah Minghella, Jon Cohen, David Robert Mitchell, Matt Jackson and Tommy Harper Director: David Robert Mitchell Screenplay: David Robert Mitchell Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis, P.J. Byrne, Anne Gee Byrd, Emily Kuroda, Hudson Meek, David Alexander Kaplan, Simms May, Grayson Thorne Kilpatrick, Pilot Bunch and Michael-Christian Moore Distributor: Warner Bros.
Grade: C
It’s fitting that a movie about time-travel—specifically, dinosaurs magically transported to a Spielbergian suburb of 1982—should come across as a throwback itself, an attempt to recapture the tone of the escapist crowd-pleasing PG-13 thrillers of the eighties. Sad to say, David Robert Mitchell’s effort to channel the feel of the movies of that era short-circuits. “The End of Oak Street” is too silly and repetitive to work except as a nostalgia trip to a cinematic past no more recoverable than the Jurassic period.
Mitchell, who scored with the low-budget horror flick “It Follows” in 2014, is working on a much bigger scale this time around, dependent in great measure on the visual effects team supervised by Jay Cooper. But the budget doesn’t appear to have been big enough to support really cutting-edge technical work: the prehistoric critters on display aren’t embarrassingly bad, but they’re hardly amazing either. Nor is their integration with the human cast as seamless as one might hope.
The predictably troubled family at the center of the action are the Platts. Greg (Ewan McGregor) is hiding the fact that he’s been laid off from his regular job, trying futilely to cover the loss of income by delivering pizzas. His unfulfilled wife Denise (Anne Hathaway) is secretly writing a novel at night in the basement. Daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), a science nerd, dreams of going to Cornell, but doubts she’ll get in. And her younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) rides around on his bike with his pals (Grayson Thorne Kilpatrick, Pilot Bunch and Michael-Christian Moore), but he’s also being pursued by a bully, Haden Tucker (Hudson Meek), who blames him for breaking his younger brother Charlie’s (David Alexander Kaplan) arm.
But despite the internal strains, all are devoted to the family dog, Starbuck (as in “Battlestar Galactica”), though their nasty next-door neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrne) is furious about the mess the mutt is creating in his back yard, and especially about a huge pile of excrement he assumes that Brian and his pals have dumped there as a prank.
More strange stuff happens. Former book editor Mrs. Huddleston (Anne Gee Byrd), a neighbor who’s helping Denise with her novel, finds a peculiar growth in her garden, a weird flower that appears to be a plant species extinct for millions of years. Then blazing lights in the sky, accompanied by terrible thunder and raging wind, are followed by odd rustlings in the surrounding forest. They’re gradually revealed to be caused by raptors and other assorted prehistoric beasts unaccountably transported to the Oak Street neighborhood. They prove very dangerous to folks like Mrs. Huddleston and Mel. And the Platts’ attempts to escape fail because the area has been cut off from the rest of the city by cliffs, swamps and jungle.
The family hunkers down in their house (though the supposedly bright Audrey sneaks out to listen to music in the car, even if doing so would wear down the battery), but eventually they venture into the streets, especially after Brian climbs out a window in search of Starbuck. From that point the movie becomes a pretty rote series of chases and close shaves, with special reliance on the cliché in which one or another of the Platts is featured in the foreground while some danger (be it a giant snake or a Tyrannosaurus Rex) approaches stealthily from the background. A brief, loopy interruption occurs when Haden attacks Brian until Charlie pulls him away; he’s apparently still consumed by a desire for revenge despite the greater danger all are facing.
There are also few jokes along the way (like Denise having Greg pose for a Polaroid in front of a couple of Brontosauruses engaging in sex), but overall the action is relatively tame, though aiming for tension; there are some corpses lying around, but fewer than one might expect, and blood is in surprisingly short supply. Throughout Michael Giacchino’s score, abetted by Paula Fairfield’s sound design, adheres to the dull pattern of revving up to a shattering chord during a perilous episode before abruptly falling away as editor John Axelrad cuts to a quieter aftermath. It merely accentuates the episodic structure the movie’s fallen into.
Toward the close the little troupe is increased by the addition of Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis) before one of the family falls heroically in battle. By then Audrey has begun speculating about worm holes and time portals as explanations for what’s happening, but even a reference to Stephen Hawking can’t lend a vestige of plausibility to such nonsense. Nonetheless Mitchell latches onto the hypothesis, and contrives an escape around a portal—a shimmering translucent orb—at a house where Mrs. Valcourt (Emily Kuroda) wields a shotgun against a horde of attacking dinos that allows the survivors to jump back to a time in 1982 shortly before the dinos appeared on Oak Street.
There’s little logic to this, of course, but even less to what follows—a tacked-on coda that allows everyone to live happily ever after, even people who have to be resurrected by one of the most ludicrous tricks in recent movies. But admittedly in the eighties these kinds of pictures twisted themselves into contortions to make things turn out all right in the end.
The cast show a remarkable degree of commitment to the material, given how inane most of it is, and production designer Maya Shimoguchi makes the besieged neighborhood look attractive, even if it seems rather underpopulated (by humans, that is, not dinosaurs). Thankfully, Erin Benach’s costumes don’t go in for period exaggeration, and Michael Gioulakis’ widescreen cinematography is more than adequate, given the necessity of splicing together live action footage with so many visual effects.
In the eighties empty-headed blockbusters like this filled multiplexes during the summer, and folks gorged on them in spite of their absurdities. Many who grew up with them might enjoy a throwback like “The End of Oak Street,” if only as a blast from the past. Though old-fashioned popcorn movies can be fun, however, this one ends up tasting rather stale.