I don't understand why there aren't more dinoasaur movies without the word "Jurassic" in the title -- I guess they try every so often, like that one with Adam Driver that I have completely forgotten and will not be spending the time to look up, and that semi-hostile indifference to even trying to remember that turd probably answers my question as to why there aren't more dinosaur movies without "Jurassic" in the title! It's not like these movies can be made for peanuts -- even in the age of accessibility for most to passable movie-making equipment dinosaurs still represent a challenge. (How long until we see some A.I. slop dinosaur nonsense making the rounds? I suppose it already exists and I've just been wily enough to avoid it.)
Anyway out this weekend is another one of Hollywood's sporadic stabs at making a dinosaur movie without "Jurassic" in the title -- and hey, this one is better than that last one. Sorta! The End of Oak Street stars Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway as Greg and Denise, a married couple on the rocks in the mid-1980s who have a daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) and a son Brian (Christian Convery), and who find themselves and their entire neighborhood sucked through a wormhole to predator-stuffed Prehistory. Thankfully nobody spends much time bothering to explain the inexplicable science of this -- Audrey's a fan of Carl Sagan and gives it a brief go but it's blessedly as hand-wavy as, "Welp well that happened," and then everybody moves on to the chomp-chomp of it all.
What they move on to probably should have been a better movie -- if you're prone to bees in your bonnet over characters behaving stupidly then this movie will feel like that rightly beloved meme of
Oprah Winfrey releasing the bees sprung to life beneath your headwear. Beyond waving away the nonsensical science of the family's exceptional situation, writer-director David Robert Mitchell (yes the same man who made the incredible horror movie
It Follows; I know) also hand-waves away any legitimate reasons to keep this family out of their boarded-up house. They are constantly, moronically wandering the streets even as they're watching their neighbors get gnawed and torn to shreds.
That's one of the film's more delicious bits, though -- it sure ain't afraid to be vicious. Although most of it's seen from a good distance people do die horribly in this movie, including one genuine shock moment that legit left my jaw hanging. But the movie's meanness in that respect teeters precipitously against its Choose Your Own Family Adventure set-up -- it's not a wholly comfortable fit, and the movie really strains against itself. There is something admirable in its willingness to wind its own tonal path I suppose (it certainly isn't playing safe) but it veers too close to the nastiness of that scene in the first Jurassic World movie where that young woman was tossed around and torn apart by Pteranodons. Gratuitous and grim.
The main issue though, besides how dumb these people keep behaving for no discernable reason, is a phrase I've been using a lot lately -- The End of Oak Street definitely suffers ftom "the conservative creep" that's been affecting so much Hollywood product over the past few years. Wedged-in conversations about religious faith keep popping up, and the film's ultimate goal -- which I promise you isn't a spoiler since it's obvious it's what this movie's about all of five minutes in -- is to make Mom stop being so darn angry and to appreciate her darn family again. While words like "Amblin-esque" will surely be tossed at this flick for all of its 80s nostalgia, a more appropriate one would surely be "Reagan-esque." Shudder, indeed.
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