'The End of Oak Street' review: Prehistoric mayhem puts some bite back into the summer blockbuster

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

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Oh, what fun it is to see a late-summer sleeper that feels like a refreshing throwback to an era when original ideas were the norm and you could count on getting one or two of them every other week. Nowadays, we’re lucky to get one or two in an entire summer. Enter David Robert Mitchell’s enormously fun “The End of Oak Street,” which has an elevator pitch so delightfully simple it almost sells itself: an entire two-mile radius of a suburban Detroit neighborhood is somehow transported back to prehistoric times.

It’s a premise practically manufactured in the mold of the Amblin heyday, when ordinary families could be dropped into extraordinary circumstances and filmmakers trusted spectacle, character and a little bit of movie magic to do the rest. Yet Mitchell isn’t simply reheating Spielberg leftovers. “The End of Oak Street” has enough personality of its own to turn that nostalgic framework into a genuine thrill ride, complete with carnage, mayhem and, most importantly, a family you actually want to spend time with between creature attacks.

Mitchell, a Michigan native who made a name for himself with the lo-fi 2014 indie classic “It Follows” before following it with the equally idiosyncratic “Under the Silver Lake,” thankfully didn’t cash in that goodwill on some godforsaken Marvel property. Instead, he uses the opportunity to make a mini-blockbuster with plenty of horsepower in the tank. This is a thrill fest that largely checks its brain at the door without asking its audience to do the same, establishing enough internal logic and emotional investment that we buy into the ridiculous reality of its world.

We’ve all seen our fair share of dinosaur movies by now, so there isn’t exactly a whole lot of novelty left to be minted from watching prehistoric beasts chase screaming humans. Putting Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor in the driver’s seat certainly gives the material some pedigree, but Mitchell’s smarter move is shifting the playground. Rather than sending another group of people to some isolated island, he brings the prehistoric world crashing into the cul-de-sacs, living rooms and backyards of American suburbia.

We follow the Platt family: Denise (Hathaway), Greg (McGregor) and their two children, Audrey (Maisy Stella), who is preparing to leave for Cornell, and her younger brother Brian (Christian Convery). There’s also Starbuck, the family’s adorable and trusty canine sidekick. In the opening moments, their life appears idyllic as the family takes in a neighborhood block party, but it doesn’t take long to realize something is fractured underneath the surface. There’s an unmistakable tension between Denise and Greg, and the kids suspect their parents may be on the cusp of divorce. Mitchell wisely establishes those cracks before literally ripping their world apart.

That happens when a lightning storm ripped straight out of 2006’s “War of the Worlds” transports the Platts, along with everyone within a two-mile radius, to an era in which Oak Street has suddenly become a suburban playground for prehistoric creatures. Their familiar neighborhood is now surrounded by dense jungle and active volcanoes, while enormous beasts with carnivorous appetites roam between houses looking for their next meal.

It’s such an inherently silly premise that the temptation would be to constantly wink at the audience, but Mitchell largely resists it. Instead, he commits to the bit. The sight of prehistoric monsters barreling through a recognizably modern neighborhood supplies much of the movie’s charm, and it’s considerably more fun than when “Jurassic World: Dominion” tried playing in a similar sandbox a few years ago. Mitchell understands that the juxtaposition itself is the joke. He doesn’t need his characters constantly reminding us how ridiculous it is.

Better yet, he builds some terrific set pieces designed to make us squirm in our seats, frequently using the domestic setting to play with our sense of scale and safety. One sequence involving a slithering python the length of several football fields sneaking into a home is particularly nerve-wracking, turning an ordinary house into a claustrophobic death trap. There’s an appealing crunchiness to the action throughout, too. For all its family-blockbuster DNA, “The End of Oak Street” doesn’t completely sand down its edges, allowing the creature encounters to have some actual bite.

There is, of course, an inevitability to the family melodrama. The moment we learn Denise and Greg’s marriage is struggling, it’s not difficult to guess that being hurled millions of years into the past and forced to protect their children might help everyone reconsider what matters. Mitchell never finds a particularly novel way around those familiar beats, and the emotional resolution can occasionally feel predetermined rather than discovered. Hathaway and McGregor, however, sell the material with enough conviction that the predictability rarely becomes a dealbreaker. The movie works because we believe in the Platts as a family, fractured though they may be, and watching them rediscover their resourcefulness and reliance on one another gives the spectacle an emotional anchor.

Composer Michael Giacchino delivers a rollicking score that will undoubtedly invite comparisons to a certain seminal Spielberg classic, but there are enough touches throughout to remind us this is still Mitchell’s sandbox. That includes a wonderful little moment in which Audrey sneaks into a car to listen to the 1982 banger “Valerie” by Steve Winwood. Even with considerably more money and spectacle at his disposal, Mitchell hasn’t lost his affection for those strange, specific details that make his movies feel lived in.

Is there much more depth under the hood? Not particularly. The story’s beats are overtly familiar, and Mitchell leaves some potentially richer ideas sitting on the table. There’s an obvious opportunity to use this premise to say something sharper about ecological disaster, humanity’s relationship with the natural world or even the fragility of the comfortable suburban bubble his characters inhabit. At one point, as Oak Street becomes engulfed in smoke, I couldn’t help but think about the air quality alerts we were dealing with just last month. The movie brushes against those ideas without ever digging into them, preferring forward momentum over thematic excavation.

But “The End of Oak Street” isn’t really interested in becoming a climate-change parable, and forcing it into that mold might rob it of some of its goofy charm. After three movies, it’s increasingly evident that Mitchell loves playing in the anxieties lurking beneath domesticated suburbia, and scaling that fascination up to blockbuster proportions feels like a natural progression rather than a sellout. His latest may not reinvent the creature feature, but it finds a sturdy, enormously entertaining new place to stage one.

In a summer when genuinely original studio movies have too often felt like an endangered species themselves, there’s something refreshing about watching one stomp around the neighborhood and make a mess. “The End of Oak Street” sends the summer moviegoing season out with some welcome crunch.

Grade: B

THE END OF OAK STREET is now playing in theaters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oB9AxspVow