In ‘The End of Oak Street,’ Originality Goes the Way of the Dinosaur

Imagine the pitch for the new movie “The End of Oak Street”: “It’s about a 1980s family and suburban neighborhood sucked into a wormhole and ending up in the age of the dinosaurs. Oh, and we’ll throw in a few references to classic Steven Spielberg pictures and make it schmaltzy.” On the evidence of the movie itself, the filmmakers didn’t go much deeper than that initial concept. The epitome of “dumb fun” or a “popcorn movie,” the feature conversely makes one long for an intelligent arthouse flick and a healthier snack. It’s truly so brain-explodingly dumb at times — with its characters doing some inane things and director David Robert Mitchell resorting to such cheap thrills and emotions — that I audibly scoffed more than once during the screening I attended. I suspect it won’t be the last time derision and disbelief are expressed in a theater showing the film, which opens this Friday.Of course the movie’s baseline ambitions, rudimentary shocks, and stock characters will sit perfectly well with some viewers, and I don’t wish to spoil anyone’s idea of entertainment. Still, it’s almost impossible not to feel that a project in which Warner Brothers studio spent an estimated $85 million, to say nothing of its marketing budget, and that attracted two stars, Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, should be more than just basic, and I use that word for both its traditional meaning and in the slangy manner of youth. If one is particularly uncharitable, one could accuse the creative team, including the hacky filmmaker J.J. Abrams as producer, of cooking up summer fare cynically designed to appeal to two key demographics: a younger generation missing the ‘80s-set sci-fi smörgåsbord of “Stranger Things” and older film fans weaned on “Jurassic Park.” Some might even say that the picture wasn’t so much created as calculated.Things start off rotely if mercifully brisk. Opening scenes depict a block party on “Oak Street” complete with a sack race and someone telling Mr. McGregor’s character, Greg Platt, that he’s a “lucky man” to have such a “great family.” That family consists of wife Denise (Ms. Hathaway), teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), and adolescent son Brian (Christian Convery). But things are not all hunky-dory between the couple as they argue over his side jobs, which take him away from the family, while Denise is secretly writing a roman à clef about a miserable housewife wanting to escape her life. The possibility of divorce is mentioned between the two siblings, lending some weight to the proceedings, but Mr. Mitchell, who also wrote the screenplay, undercuts this serious subject and others by slathering his film with the sentimentality of an after school special. The cloying and derivative score by Michael Giacchino doesn’t help. The movie’s tone isn’t the only fuzzy element as the digital cinematography sports a slightly grainy texture, as if to recreate the feel of traditional film. When the dinosaurs show up, the actors’ sightlines are vague while the visual effects are a bit gritty, even blurry, with the rushed editing of each dino shot indicating that the filmmakers didn’t want viewers to look too closely at the CGI. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before the family and the neighborhood wake up to find they’re living next door to a jungle filled with dinosaurs, good storytelling dictates there should be foreshadowing, and Mr. Mitchell does this in several unsubtle ways, like having a heaping pile of dung suddenly appear in the neighbor’s yard. After the perfunctory opening act, the film becomes what it really wants to be: a creature feature of a family running around a suburb, often stupidly so, while evading all manner of dinosaurs. Before it reaches that point, though, Mr. Mitchell does have the Platts attempt to grapple with what’s going on while in their barricaded home. Yet the scene’s generic staging, acting, and dialogue, including Brian’s reference to “the end of the world,” carries very little dramatic force. In two egregious scenes also set inside the house, Greg and Denise bicker about their relationship instead of focusing on more pressing concerns, like food rationing and the lack of electricity and communications, not to mention the mayhem outdoors causing the death of many of their neighbors. Generally, matters of survival get sidelined for melodrama, which in turn is followed by heartwarming pablum. Ms. Hathaway and Mr. McGregor do what they can with their banal roles, which is not much. The actress, in particular, looks pained, as if she’d rather contend with a terrifying Meryl Streep in another “The Devil Wears Prada” movie than creep around gaping and shooting at monsters that aren’t really there. As Audrey, Ms. Stella is afforded the film’s single great scene, one in which her character listens to and then sings along with Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” while sitting by herself inside a car. As the youth tries to avoid the fact that her future prospects look dim, the tuneful hit about lost love turns into a paean to unrealized passion as well as a requiem for lost innocence.A couple of the action sequences prove effective, though the dinosaurs’ movements — sometimes fast, sometimes slow — and the combative scenarios tend to reflect video game mechanics. What truly galls is the characters’ behavior, which comes across as ill-advised when not downright dunderheaded. No youth I know would behave in the witless way Audrey and Brian do in the same situation. For sheer idiocy, though, nothing beats a scene before the third act that sees Greg and Denise share a tender moment out in the dangerous open while an outrageous bit of business occurs nearby. Mr. Mitchell even has them comment on the absurdity in a dismal attempt at self-awareness by the director. The jeers and groans that will undoubtedly greet this scene are entirely justified.Once the story segues to chase movie mode, a jerky stop-and-start rhythm is established between frantic setpieces and sappy scenes. Mr. Mitchell’s focus on familial dynamics resembles Mr. Spielberg’s work yet without the master director’s ability to tie plot and atmosphere to a character’s actions and development. He also ignores all sorts of potential narrative and thematic threads, such as the decade’s nuclear jitters. What we’re left with is a film with barely any awe-inspiring imagery or real, unsettling dread — just emptyheaded running about, and the originality and saccharinity of a greeting card.

In ‘The End of Oak Street,’ Originality Goes the Way of the Dinosaur

In ‘The End of Oak Street,’ Originality Goes the Way of the Dinosaur

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