☆☆½
The End of Oak Street tries so hard to be an Amblin/Steven Spielberg film from the 1980s that it's almost lovable in its earnestness. It wants so very, very badly to be a movie like the kind Spielberg directed and produced, a movie where unbelievable and sometimes terrible things happen to a family that lives on a happy, peaceful street in a happy, peaceful suburb somewhere in the United States.
But there's something that doesn't work quite right about The End of Oak Street, in which that happy, peaceful street in that happy, peaceful suburb is invaded not by extraterrestrials or poltergeists or Bigfoot or gremlins or treasure-hunting pirates but by ... dinosaurs.
Now, it's both unfair and a little lazy these days to criticize something by saying it feels like AI could have written it. And yet ... the screenplay to this film feels more than a little like it could have been generated with a prompt: "Write a movie that blends mid-1980s Amblin films with Jurassic Park — a suburban family has to fight off man-eating dinosaurs."
The movie is set in 1982, because it would never do to have an Amblin movie be about a 21st century family — otherwise, you'd never be able to have a poster of the J. Geils Band on a kid's wall (um, did kids actually become J. Geils groupies?); a moment where a character listens to Steve Winwood sing "Valerie" (um, did teenagers listen to Steve Winwood?); a period-authentic Froot Loops box; and, of course, kids on bicycles. Here's a note to filmmakers too young to have really lived through the time: bicycles weren't as ubiquitous as today's '80s-set entertainment makes them out to be.
There are short shorts for girls and for boys, a velour shirt for Dad (Ewan McGregor), a manual typewriter for furtive author Mom (Anne Hathaway) and, of course, hushed arguments about the worst thing anyone could imagine in the 1980s: divorce.
That is, at least, the worst thing that anyone could imagine in an Amblin film. There's also a family dog, Starbuck (no, not the coffee shop, the Battlestar Galactica character ... it's 1982!), who in a most un-Spielbergian touch is tied up and left outside at night. The moment I saw that, I lost a lot of my worry about whether the family would live or die. It's the most terrifying thing on screen.
So, this oddly imperfect simulacrum of 1982 is rocked one night by strange lightning storms, following an ominous radio news report about some kind of "ripples" happening in space, or something like that, and suddenly the whole of the neighborhood is overrun with dinosaurs.
Thank goodness plucky Mom is a crack shot with a shotgun! While the rest of the neighborhood gets squished and squashed and eaten and frequently decapitated by the dinosaurs, Mom and Dad and the kids have to outrun them. All the time. And no one has any idea why Oak Street suddenly dead ends at the Mesozoic era.
That includes the screenwriters. It's a strange thing to say, but it appears nobody really cared enough to explain why any of this happens. While I don't want to drop spoilers, though in this case it's not spoiling very much, it all has something to do with Carl Sagan and wormholes. I guess. Nobody seems to know, and frankly by the end of the movie there are hardly any residents of Oak Street left alive to care.
There's a lot of gore in The End of Oak Street, which is rated PG-13 but is probably too scary and intense for most of today's pre-teens. And one particularly gory and nasty scene gives the film a true moment of shock and surprise — which it undoes with a silly, perfunctory Back to the Future-style ending in which the characters we've been watching turn out to be ... well, never mind. If you're inclined to see it, you don't want to know; if you're not, you wouldn't believe it, anyway.
Everything in The End of Oak Street just sort of ... happens. There are some genuinely tense moments, and the film is neither poorly made nor poorly acted; in many ways, what Hathaway is required to do here is infinitely more difficult than what she did in The Odyssey, and she makes it credible. She's the best part of the movie, and the only one that doesn't feel like it's trying far too hard to be from the 1980s.
The biggest trouble with The End of Oak Street is that if it had been made in the 1980s, it would have failed. It doesn't have the heart, the awe or, especially, the wonder of those more innocent films. It's lean, hard and sometimes mean, even when it's trying to be just like those movies of yesteryear. The movies of yesteryear were a lot better.
Viewed August 17, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks
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