'The End of Oak Street' Review: Pure dinosaur delight

It is not often that a dinosaur movie releases nowadays that is actually good. You would think it shouldn’t be that hard–just deliver great dinosaur thrills, and you should be good to go. The End of Oak Street is finally a film that understood the assignment. There is a lot that can and will be unpacked about the film, but it knew what mattered most. It reminds me most of a classic throwback film that does well on its promise to entertain. Think of films like the original Jumanji, rather than necessarily Jurassic Park, which is a deeper and sounder movie than this is.

There is really only one thing that matters when deciding whether to give The End of Oak Street a thumbs-up or down, and that is how well it delivers dinosaur fun. In that regard, it is an easy thumbs-up. The film does a good job of building up to the first dinosaur reveal, and from there, it doesn’t really let up. It intersperses good action sequences regularly, and while some are predictable, such as the finale, others are entirely shocking. No matter what, it is always entertaining, and for that alone it earns a positive score from me.

The dinosaur stuff isn’t the only good aspect of The End of Oak Street, as it has a couple of surrounding elements that enhance it. Anne Hathaway is one of them. There isn’t any bad acting in the movie, but she is far and away the best in the film. She is given the most to work with and turns in a surprisingly strong performance, especially from an emotional standpoint, even if you don’t like the direction the story goes. The score from Michael Giacchino is the other sneakily superb thing the film has going for it. It’s fun, playful, and brings the right amount of energy.

In order to present the absurd situation that The End of Oak Street offers–dinosaurs running rampant through a 1980s neighborhood–a gimmick is necessary to set that sort of film in motion. Much of your enjoyment may be decided based upon this setup and premise. For me, I was easily able to buy into it, as I am usually accepting of just about any event to jumpstart the inciting incident of a film. Without the gimmick implemented here, there is no plausible way to make a movie like this make any sense, nor could it bring the amount of fun it invites onto the screen. I thought it was clever enough from beginning to end, even if some things had to be shoehorned in to make it all work.

The other thing you have to buy into, which is pretty much guaranteed in any movie like this, is that characters are going to make poor decisions. This is a classic staple of the genre, as we all know. The best thing I can say about it is that it further drives the dinosaur action, so I can’t fault it entirely, but I do wish the payoffs came with better setups. There is also a tiny bit of goofiness that comes with some of these actions, resulting in a few questionable moments. Furthermore, the camerawork is well done but plays around with quick zooms and environmental shots; while these stylistic choices sometimes work, they occasionally miss the mark, contributing to that slight sense of goofiness across the film.

Where The End of Oak Street struggles most is with its serious tonal issues. For a movie that, at first glance, looks to be more of a classic, traditional, family blockbuster, it contains some darker elements that do not feel totally ripe for this kind of film. That’s not to say it’s executed poorly–it just feels somewhat out of place. The film has these wild mood swings, including one sequence that turns from outright laughter to downright terror and shock just a minute or two later. This could be viewed as a positive by some, and I do think the individual components are strong, but they don’t mesh well together in a conventional way.

The secondary problem The End of Oak Street has is its uneven and underdeveloped subplots. As gripping as the main plot is, parts of it get dragged down to serve these other storylines that go absolutely nowhere and have no good payoff at all. One involves the neighborhood bully, whose plotline ends abruptly and confusingly in the middle of the film with no satisfaction whatsoever. Another involves a girl who is left alone after her family is presumably killed. She feels very tacked on, bringing no real substance or utility to the main plot; she is kind of just there. I would have liked for these threads to have a better follow-through, especially since time had already been invested early on to set them up.

What bothered me the most, however, was how the film went back on its character choices, essentially undoing them for a last-minute course correction into a happy ending. This resolution was inconsistent with how the movie had played out up to that point. I wanted the film to either stick to its guns or not go down the path it went down at all, instead of blending the two approaches together in a contradictory way.

If I were just grading The End of Oak Street solely on its essential dinosaur thrills and delights, it would probably fall in the A- to A territory. Unfortunately, the mixed and bad elements end up dragging it down a good bit. But going forward, what I’ll remember the movie for won’t be its family drama, up-and-down tone, or muddled subplots–it will obviously be the dinosaurs. That is the standout element that will make the difference in any future rankings because, at the end of the day, it was a damn fun time.