The End of Oak Street

It is initially amusing but oddly inert; contrived, derivative, commercially driven and weirdly inconsequential, a Spielbergian mashup about dinosaurs running amok in suburbia that doesn't feel like homage so much as a pastiche produced by an AI Spielbergbot. The End of Oak Street is fun at first, but it feels like Mitchell doesn't really believe in any of it.

A Pre-Hysterically Entertaining Dino Flick That Gets Away With More Than It Should

Bloody, goofy, nostalgic and gloriously ridiculous, The End of Oak Street knows that the cinema can still be a place where hundreds of strangers collectively lose their minds over a dinosaur eating someone. It's a fitting way to close out the summer.

While it's mindlessly entertaining in a big-dumb-fun kind of way, this is a movie that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, beyond a worshipful homage to 1980s Amblin. After the early promise of his captivating debut feature and his confident leap into horror with It Follows, the director appears to be slumming it here, dipping his toes into blockbuster waters that inevitably evoke Jurassic Park and all its children, in a half-jokey tone that tends to undermine the terror.

At its best, The End of Oak Street understands that the most effective dinosaur thrillers are not really about dinosaurs. They are about putting ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and watching them figure out how to survive. Mitchell does not pretend to offer hard science, and the film has a simple objective: keep the family alive and find a way home.