Ewan McGregor, Anne Hathaway, Maisy Stella and Christian Convery in The End of Oak Street [Warner Bros Pictures]
THE END OF OAK STREET
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Certificate: 12a
IT might be fitting that this film is an absolute whopper of a turkey – after all, it features feathered dinosaurs, the ancestors of that Christmas dinner must-have.
But it is so stupid, it is actually terrific – a five-star joke that is simply a must-see for its all action-packed romping. I can’t decide if it was one or five stars – and for that fact alone, it’s worth viewing and has all the hallmarks to become a cult film.
Produced by JJ Abrams, the sci-fi / thriller master film-maker, director David Robert Mitchell has assembled a cast who take this hugely silly monster flick with deep seriousness.
It is an unashamed homage to great 80s family adventure movies, though with a good dollop of bloodiness thrown in – its stylish layout, colour, casting and characters bow down before Spielberg’s greatest hits of the period.
The plot – if that’s what this imaginative jumble of silliness can be described as – focuses on the Platt family, whose quiet neighbourhood is sucked into a time portal and lands bang straight back into the Jurassic period.
They live in AN Other American suburb, perhaps not a million miles away from where Dilan found ET. They are happy-ish family but dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) and mom Denise (Anne Hathaway) have a dollop of adult life problems to deal with: Greg has lost his well-paid job and is working as a pizza delivery man, Denise is a struggling writer.
One morning, as the do-gooding Denise visits an elderly neighbour, she is flummoxed by the sudden appearance of a strange fern growing in the pensioner’s back garden.
She digs it up and then enquires at her local library for some information as to what it is. In such pre-internet innocent days it requires the brainy librarian – who you just know will have a role to play later in the flick – to say she has never seen anything like it, and weirdly, it looks like a plant that went extinct 200 million years ago.
To further deepen the mysterious goings on, a grumpy neighbour who has already made himself a clear target for a bloody ending later, finds a huge steaming turd in the middle of his lawn.
That night, strange lights appear in the skies above this suburban utopia and suddenly the family are fighting for their lives as dinosaurs appear in front gardens, intent on eating whatever crosses their path.
What unravels is a series of ever-increasing nonsense as the Platt family try to figure out what has happened and why they seem to have been transported to prehistoric times, and what they may be able to do about it.
This film is thankfully short at about 90 minutes – any longer and the joke would surely wear thin.
What does it tell us about the USA today? Alien and disaster films have always been used as a metaphor and perhaps the giant puddles of dino poo and a scene that has dinosaurs copulating is a metaphor for the oil firms killing our planet, led by a president whose views are prehistoric.
The film could do with a little more ingenuity from the Platts in their quest to survive – this lacks the guile of say Home Alone – but regardless, this is a must-see mess, one of the funniest and silliest films of the year, and if you step into the auditorium expecting nothing but a Monty Python level of avant garde nonsense packaged as a Jurassic Park-style action film, you’re in for a treat.
It also revels in super-silly special effects to take the film down a clownish path where violent deaths at the hand of reptiles will be cheered by the viewer, rather than be winced at from behind the sofa.
