The End of Oak Street Review: You’ll Never Look at Your Neighborhood the Same Way

The Platt family comes together when a mysterious galactic event transports their neighborhood to prehistoric times!

Everyone, meet the Platts, a prime example of a current middle-American family – Mom and Dad’s relationship is strained, mostly over financial concerns, and it’s beginning to become more obvious to their not-blind kids, of which there are two: an introverted science-nerdy older girl and a mischievous bike-riding younger brother, who loves his dog to the ends of the earth.

Pretty standard stuff, right? Except in this instance, Mom is played with fierce mama bear energy by Anne Hathaway, and bumbling but well-meaning Dad is Ewan McGregor. Audrey (Maisey Stella) does well at holding it together when actual dinosaurs start charging through her backyard, and Brian (Christian Convery) is a cute little character right out of Stand By Me, or perhaps even Stephen King’s IT, and for real, who doesn’t love an adventurous young boy and his beloved dog? We need to come to care about these characters; otherwise the whole thing turns into a Doom-like farce of just killing enemy monsters. And the movie has to make us care about these characters quickly, because yes, we are indeed also here for the dinosaurs in the backyard trope the trailers promised, as well. We want the family therapy tale, wrapped in a dinosaur-laden family action-comedy; we want it all, and Oak Street absolutely delivers.

The neighborhood barbeque is the perfect chance to introduce us to all sorts of neighborhood characters, along with the Platts themselves. Neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrne) is a nuisance about the Brians’ dog Starbuck, and anything else he can find to complain about really; the man is annoying as hell, even if he’s not entirely wrong about the dog. Newcomer neighbor Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis) keeps to herself, despite being of interest to all the neighborhood boys Brian’s age. Mom sits and talks with Mrs. Huddleston (Anne Gee Byrd), a retired writer now giving editorial notes on Mom’s secret manuscript, and also showing Mom this odd plant that grew awfully fast in her backyard. Mom later heads to the library, talking with librarian Mrs.

Valcourt (Emily Kuroda) about said plant, and we just want to point out that between the two of these very smart old school women, not a computer in sight but rather good old-fashioned books and some investigation, eventually discovered it’s a plant that hasn’t existed on Earth in a whole lot of years.

Amidst all this fairly common dramatic stuff going on, are strange lightning storms a-brewing, the kind of thing that can’t be explained away like extended fireworks, but ones that really make you go, wth? Then of course come the repercussions – powers out, waters down, food is starting to run low, the dogs missing, the boys fretting. And what are those weird noises coming from outside? Why did it start getting so warm, all of a sudden? Was that screaming?

The movie manages to capture a kind of ridiculous dinosaur magic that hasn’t been seen in a while, a combination of “this is what animals normally do” snark, mixed in with sudden smirking reminders that hey, these are still gigantic prehistoric unpredictable predators. Tiny grinning details, like killer-cute little Coelophysis with feathers and teeth being the first wave, and the freaking polaroid of dad with the two dinos in the background, are the perfect foil to each other, and keep the audience rolling. We find ourselves screaming right along with Mom, as she buries her kitchen blade into a giant prehistoric serpent thing over and over, shrieking like a cavewoman, a Mother, instinctive badass she is, and this thing needs to DIE.

What caused the entire neighborhood of Oak Street to biddy-bop its whole way back to prehistoric times and these absolute monster animals is, at best, nebulous and hard to explain, much less digest as a plot. And frankly we don’t need it to be explained in a way that makes sense – it’s a dinosaur movie! An actually fun, funny, family adventure-style dinosaur movie that anyone can, and likely will, enjoy. Grab the ridiculous Allosaurus-head popcorn bucket and laugh! The End of Oak Street is in theaters now!