David Robert Mitchell's new sci-fi action movie The End of Oak Street is a curious little number. It's a throwback to early 80s popcorn fare (and even takes place during that time), about a suburban family whose neighborhood suddenly gets transported to the prehistoric era and becomes overrun with dinosaurs. Starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as Denise and Greg Platt, a couple going through a crisis of marriage - she's secretly an aspiring novelist and he's working as a pizza delivery man after secretly being laid off from his full-time gig - the film gives us a brief exposition dump of all the principle characters via a block party sequence, before diving into the dino action.
Once the giant bird-lizards start showing up it's mostly about the survival set pieces, but the film does jump back into a bit of the family drama from time to time. Unfortunately the script doesn't give us much to latch on to in terms of really caring about the characters. The opening passages feel perfunctory, injecting superficial pathos into the family members without really committing to it. Thus when they find themselves in mortal danger everything feels kept at arm's length instead of immersing us in the action.
Anne Hathaway does her best to make us identify with the Platts, but McGregor's performance is nigh amateurish. I was honestly shocked at how unconvincing he is, both in the few dramatic scenes and during the action. It doesn't help that the dialogue is very much on the nose for the former ("I've been trying to hold this family together and you're trying to tear it apart!") and during the latter often serves as a running commentary for what you're already seeing on the screen. And for some reason I found McGregor's American accent rather grating, I'm not exactly sure why. But his work in this film is far below what he's capable of. If you're distracted by a poor performance from one of the two leads it's that much harder to get engaged in what happens to them.
Mitchell previously wrote and directed the cult hit horror film It Follows, also a throwback of sorts with a retro 80s feel, and here he wears his two major childhood influences on his sleeve. The neighborhood feels like a mashup of the early 80s work of the two Steves, Spielberg and King. Numerous expository scenes bring to mind the everyday suburban environment of E.T. and Poltergeist, while an ongoing spat with a next door neighbor over the Platts' dog Starbuck pooping on his lawn and a half-hearted subplot about the Platts' son Brian being stalked by a bully are right out of King's playbook. Stephen King has always prided himself on building ordinary, relatable characters and worlds before plunging them into extraordinary circumstances, and you can feel Mitchell trying to do that here. But the film's rushed 99-minute running time doesn't leave enough room for much of it to really sink in, and it doesn't seem like Mitchell fully believes it.
As for the action elements, they're generally effective. You have to respect the chutzpah of any filmmaker attempting a dinosaur survival film while the Jurassic franchise is still going strong; from a box office standpoint that seems like a hard sell at best. But Oak Street makes an effort to stand out a little by depicting the dinos as bird-like and feathered (as paleontologists now theorize they probably appeared), and more driven by animal instinct than as horror movie monsters. Industrial Light and Magic was tapped to handle the special effects, which is another ballsy move since they also handle the Jurassic films. These sequences are fun and certainly well-executed but we've seen most of it before.
The cinematography by Michael Gioulakis is at times innovative, using unbroken, smooth steadicam shots to show the action rather than jumpy, rapid-fire cuts so prevalent in other similar movies. There's also a dialogue scene in the second act that makes extensive use of deep focus so the two characters speaking can both be seen clearly at opposite sides of the frame. Choices like this certainly help make these scenes more engaging and I appreciated that aspect of the film.
But overall Oak Street felt a little too light. It's more Amblin than King, when I think leaning on the latter would've made the film more exciting and visceral. This feels like Mitchell trying to prove he can make a somewhat family-friendly crowd-pleaser (with help from Spielberg disciple, producer J.J. Abrams). The problem is, in doing so with a dinosaur movie he's inviting the inevitable comparisons with the original Jurassic Park, a film with more engaging characters and more memorable set pieces. If you're going to try and ape the all-time king of crowd-pleasing popcorn movies you're setting yourself up for a tough go of it. Is Mitchell's next movie going to be about a world-traveling archeologist who punches Nazis?
The End of Oak Street is certainly an easy movie to sit through, but maybe too easy. A bit more time spent with the characters to give them some real depth, a rewrite of the dialogue so it doesn't feel so trite, and a harder edge to the action would've raised the stakes and made this movie more than just a cute little homage to the 80s.
I give The End of Oak Street **1/2 out of ****.
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