So I caught the new “fantasy-disaster” movie The End of Oak Street, the second one in a week. It echoes Netflix’s The Last House. Both feature cutesy nuclear families with well-behaved kids and put-upon parents. Both feature impossible scenarios involving some very unlikely natural or unnatural disasters happening to said “average” American family. Oak Street trumps Last House in star billing: It features Ewan MacGregor and Anne Hathaway as the parents, an A-list cast if there ever was one. For my money Oak Street is quite a bit better, even if it’s high implausible, to say the least.
My thumbnail summation: It’s like Jurassic Park meets Poltergeist. Set in a middle-class suburb circa 1982, it features a family that resembles the cast of Poltergeist, except there’s no youngster who gets spirited into the TV to hang out with the “TV people” who happen to be ghosts. Jurassic Park because, well, unlikely as it may seem for 1982, there are dinosaurs. At times it seems a homage to the iconic suburban-set horror films of the 1980s like Poltergeist and Goonies, but once the dinos show up, it’s Action-Adventure time. Ewan MacGregor plays the Dad well, being a bit down-on-his-luck and desperate, and Anne Hathaway plays his wife, a wannabe writer, who ends up playing the most important role in the drama. At some point one of the kids asks, “Is this the end of the world?” Answer is No. Not that inclusive. It’s just the end of Oak Street.