DUBAI: There is something amazingly absurd about watching an entire suburban neighborhood get ripped out of its familiar reality and dropped into a prehistoric nightmare. But in David Robert Mitchell’s nostalgia-tinted “The End of Oak Street,” the dinosaurs are almost beside the point.
The film follows the Platt family — Denise (Anne Hathaway), Greg (Ewan McGregor) and their two children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) — whose already-fractured family life is upended when their 1980s Michigan neighborhood is mysteriously transported millions of years into the past. What follows is exactly the kind of creature-feature mayhem the premise promises: bloodthirsty predators, gory deaths and lots of frantic running.
Yet what makes the film work is Mitchell’s decision to let the domestic drama breathe alongside the rip-roaring dinosaur thrills. The film is less interested in rushing through its characters’ problems to get to the next dinosaur attack than in using the chaos to expose the cracks already running through this seemingly perfect suburban family.
That gives Hathaway — who is having an extremely busy year on the big screen — plenty to work with, and she makes the most of it. Not only does she make for a great scream queen, Hathaway’s Denise is a woman questioning the life she has built. Hathaway gives those quieter moments a surprising emotional weight, while McGregor brings an appealing vulnerability to her well-meaning but bumbling husband Greg.
Mitchell also has fun dismantling the mythology of suburban safety. The neat houses, manicured lawns and straight roads offer little protection when a dinosaur comes charging through the street.
At times, the film’s ambition threatens to overwhelm its more intimate ideas, and some of its stranger turns will leave viewers scratching their heads. But “The End of Oak Street” ultimately succeeds because it understands that the best blockbuster spectacle means more when there is something human underneath it.
Ridiculous, frightening and unexpectedly heartfelt, this is a dinosaur movie with considerably more on its mind, and it works exactly because of it.
