“The End of Oak Street”: Spielbergian déjà vu along with dinosaur thrills

Rampaging dinosaurs isn’t something the humble residents of Oak Street expected to wake up to. — Warner Bros.

The End of Oak Street

Starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella and Christian Covery. Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Opens Friday in theatres everywhere. 99 minutes. PG

⭐️⭐️⭐️ (out of 4)

Peter Howell

Movie Critic

Funny to think the summer’s most Spielbergian movie isn’t “Disclosure Day,” the one made by the man himself.

Instead, it’s David Robert Mitchell's “The End of Oak Street,” a dinosaur survival thriller that flexes like a classic Spielbergian blockbuster on steroids, albeit a tad gorier than the master usually goes. It has more “Jurassic Park” allusions and other Spielberg motifs — including the requisite family squabbles — than you can shake a leg bone at.

Set in 1982, the film plunges a Michigan mom (Anne Hathaway) and dad (Ewan McGregor) and two precocious teen kids into an absurd and scary scenario after their quiet neighbourhood is somehow teleported to prehistoric times.

There are rapacious raptors, giant snakes, at least one T. rex plus dino poop (and sex) to contend with. I like how the random poop pile recalls the mud-and-mashed-potatoes model of Devils Tower that a delirious Richard Dreyfuss makes in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

As they try to figure out what happened — pesky space aliens are the early suspects — Anne Hathaway’s aspiring novelist Denise finds a rifle and her inner Annie Oakley while McGregor’s whisky-swigging Greg swings both bat and sledgehammer with conviction. Maisy Stella and Christian Covery play the teens, Audrey and Brian, whose bad decisions further the logic-free plot, which, as an IMAX ride, is easy (and often enjoyable) to go along with as big and gnashing summer escapism.

What’s disappointing, though, is the contrast of its most genre-twisting, Spielberg-subverting sequences and its too-tidy ending. It lands as if Mitchell, after the confusing chin-scratcher that was “Under the Silver Lake,” was reined in considerably for a big commercial comeback.

But “Oak Street” undeniably succeeds as a late-summer blockbuster, which is really all the popcorn crowd is looking for right now.

If audiences wonder what happen to puzzlemaster Mitchell, the one who made “Silver Lake” so hard to parse, they might pick his latest effort apart to ask if interlopers teleported into the scriptwriting process. 🌛