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.
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.
Posts
