The End of Oak Street – Review

Want an action adventure where you just have to say, “Well, okay, sure, why not, whatever,” when it comes to the story? Any interest? What about if I threw in prehistoric beasts? “What?” you say? Well… The End of Oak Street brings a family adventure along with some gnarly chomping dangers.

It is 1982 and American suburban life in Michigan is just grand. Greg Platt (McGregor) has a side job acting as delivery driver for Pete’s Pizza and even brings it for dinner. He lives on Oak Street (I KNOW, TOTAL SHOCKER) with his wife Denise (Hathaway) and two kids Audrey (Stella) and Brian (Convery). They are picture perfect, however brewing under this visage is a bit of stress between Denise and Greg.

Despite a beautiful summer day and family barbeques, Greg needs money and Denise has secretly written a book which appears to be about a woman looking for a possible way out. Oh well, unusual ripples in space being tracked by NASA including solar flares should help mend this family dilemma, right?

The End of Oak Street has a good core cast and decent family dynamic which is thrown into a very stressful situation where they must work together to try and stay alive. The plot is not all that typical despite its results and does require suspension of disbelief, but you know, welcome to watching movies. SO, some crazy insane-o setup occurs and there is a lot of adventure to come.

The script contains enough and the effects are good enough that the great actors can carry it through its shortish runtime. Personally, after a bunch of really underwhelming Jurassic Park/World sequels, The End of Oak Street acts as an okay diversion into similar territory that provides slightly better emotional heft and story. All that being said, I found some of this too ‘by the numbers’ considering the wild plot premise.