Dino Might: THE END OF OAK STREET

We used to regularly have big summer special effects pictures with a light touch, lots of surprises, and a neat conclusion. The End of Oak Street makes it look so easy you’ll wonder why they've gone the way of the...well....dinosaur. If only all of its ilk were so simple and satisfying. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s working with an irresistible premise delivered quickly and confidently. It’s thin, but pays out with big results. The idea is this: a block of suburban Michigan is zapped from 1982 back to prehistoric times. The escalation is expertly handled from the early quotidian unease (maybe it’s just a power outage!), to the slow reveals (oh, it’s definitely not!), to the climactic tumbling out of variables that are both surprising and inevitable. We follow one family (mom Anne Hathaway, dad Ewan McGregor, and two teenagers) as they try to survive dinosaurs roaming their neighborhood. How do they get out of this predicament when their neighbors are getting chomped, and there seems to be no way home? The suspense is obvious here, but it’s no less exciting to see enormous creatures wandering down the asphalt, rummaging in trash cans, slipping through the forest, and towering over homes. What kid in a dinosaur phase hasn’t looked out the car window and wondered what that’d look like? The movie has the energy of imaginative wonderment driven into lean, effective survival thriller plotting. 

The movie has a playful mean streak and a sentimental core, a fun mix that works like jet fuel for its sequences’ thrills. No one’s safe from getting chomped, and the movie’s love of its lead family makes us flinch with every close call. Every time an enormous creatures comes stalking through the background of a shot is as effective as the last. (Watch out!) And each solution leads to another problem in fine roller coaster style. I enjoyed its overall sense of one-thing-after-another that works through every complication with gusto. And I appreciated the seriousness with which the characters take their dilemmas. They have doubts and stress, they slip and flail, they trial and error, they might even wet themselves when an enormous reptile is repeatedly slamming its head into the front door. But they also are animated by a clear love of one another that gets only tighter the more their lives threaten to slip away. That’s consistent with Mitchell’s strength with actors. He’s gotten earnest authenticity out of everything from awkward teen dramedy (The Myth of the American Sleepover) to arty horror (It Follows) and zany conspiracy thriller (Under the Silver Lake). And it’s consistent with the ease he has establishing widescreen mood and space while delineating high concepts. That’s enough on which to hang a quick and exciting genre picture. No need to load it up with extra metaphors or complicated twists. Just set it up cleanly and clearly, populate it with believable types, and let the blood start pumping. It may not be especially deep, but it’s a lot of fun.