You know that feeling you get when you go to a party or meet some people for dinner at a restaurant and you feel more and more uncomfortable the more you listen to them talk? You start realizing, Hmm, I have nothing to say to these people. We have nothing in common. It was a mistake coming here. How can I escape this group? That's how I felt watching the dangerous adventure film, “The End of Oak Street.”
Tapping into the nostalgia of childhood imagination, “The End of Oak Street” takes a large suburban neighborhood and transplants it into a prehistoric time full of jungle terrain and hungry dinosaurs. This story focuses on the Platt family with a mother, father, daughter, son, and dog who must work together to survive this new world and try finding a way to escape.
Very little time is spent explaining how this 1980s suburb finds itself millions of years in the past. That's fine with me; scientific theory is not what this film is about. What it's really about is the traditional nuclear family struggling to stay alive and to stay together.
Director and screenwriter David Robert Mitchell made a big splash in 2014 with his inventive, conceptual horror film, “It Follows.” That film is polarizing to lots of movie lovers, but something this director's work has is a consistently dark edge.
David Robert Mitchell likes exploring uncomfortable ideas meant to make audiences uneasy. Now, he's taken a big left turn with this new release. “The End of Oak Street” does have some exciting action sequences showing the family discovering the dinosaurs, running from them, or hiding from them. The reveals of different dinosaurs are patient and well-orchestrated, carefully luring each viewer onto the edge of their seat.
So, this film does have some entertainment value, but the overall directorial approach here is so overly sentimental and cheap, I thought some of the family's brushes with death were intentionally ridiculous. At triumphant moments, showing a death scene or a miraculous save, I thought, should I be laughing at this because it feels like I should?
This film answers the question: what if The Brady Bunch were transported to the time of the dinosaurs? Or what if the Swiss Family Robinson characters worked their way through the Cretaceous period?
The premise here is interesting, but its incessantly plucky vibe seriously diminishes its overall effect.
What makes “The End of Oak Street” most interesting and the biggest part of its publicity is the dinosaurs. For the past 36 years, the only large-scale live-action dinosaur films people watched were the “Jurassic Park” films and “Jurassic World” films.
Very few dinosaur films have been released in the past three decades without the word Jurassic in the title. Considering this short list of realistic dinosaur films in recent years, “The End of Oak Street” is a brave statement because the bar for visual effects has been set so high.
It has many different dinosaur species, and none of them look like the dinosaurs we're visually familiar with in the Jurassic films. “The End of Oak Street” also takes a brave swing by placing the dinosaur premise in a domestic setting, something we haven't seen much of on the big screen.
Hollywood is currently terrified to make a mainstream blockbuster not connected to familiar intellectual property, so “The End of Oak Street” does deserve some credit here being a new idea. With a PG-13 rating, this film is a satisfying choice for families visiting the movie theater, but it's a shame to have so many old-fashioned stereotypes in this, clumsily pushing for family unity in the face of displacement and environmental change.
For Flix at 48, I'm Casey T. Allen.
