My ire for It Follows remains unparalleled. I can, have, and will again rant about how overrated writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s debut film is and how monstrous I find its message. I have read the missives about how it is actually a feminist film. With all due respect to those opinions (but none to the film itself): Nah. I have remained in the minority about both the quality of that movie and the intentions of its creator.

Vindication, The End of Oak Street be thy name.  

Mitchell’s first blockbuster is a throbbing blob of nonsense peddling an unmistakably conservative moral. Insofar as it is about anything, and one could easily argue it isn’t, it is about how hardworking alcoholic dads are actually pretty cool, nuclear families are the best, and women who yearn for independence are silly.

Also silly: Everything that happens in the movie. That’s actually fine. To be very, very clear, my problems with the film don’t hinge on its goofy premise or clunky plot. For reasons that are never really explained, which again is totally fine, a whole neighborhood is transported from around 1980 back millions of years into the past.

Denise (Anne Hathaway), her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), their daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) and son Brian (Christian Convery) must fight for survival against a myriad of dinosaurs, some of whom have feathers, which is neat-ish. There are no real surprises, and the resolution is objectively hilarious. Cool.

Each and every performance is grotesque, which is proof that Mitchell is responsible. Hathaway has appeared in four movies this year. She was varying degrees of good-to-great in all of the others. Here, she is a snarling, weird mess. McGregor barely registers as present. The young performers were all clearly coached to deliver every line in the most inorganic way possible. The dog does the best acting.

Nobody expects much from dialogue in a movie like this, but even by that bar, if you can make it through Greg telling Denise she’s “silly” or any of their groan-inducing bickering without snickering, you should win some kind of prize. The bickering thing is the worst. The End of Oak Street reads like a preteen wrote it to work through his parents’ divorce. There’s no sign that an adult who has had adult relationships even so much as offered input on the marriage that we’re shown.

Denise wants to leave. Greg is mad at her for wanting to leave. Those are emotions dependent on other actions or experiences. The closest we have to those actions or experiences are “Greg works hard and drinks sometimes.” Their children also get these weird, half-hearted backstories. Brian broke a kids arm and is now afraid of that kid’s brother. Okay? Audrey likes Carl Sagan and is going through some generic coming-of-age stuff? Alright.

All of that is bad. But if this was a glee-filled or thrilling “dinosaurs chew up the suburbs” movie, none of it would matter much. It is not. I have been floored to see others react to the film as such, but hey, I’ve been here before. Just like It Follows, The End of Oak Street is so nakedly terrible to me that I don’t care if this is an Emperor’s New Clothes thing and only I can see it’s gross parts.

Gross parts abound, by the way. To preserve the PG-13 rating, some of the most awful, unconscionable things happen but are bloodless, which means it is fine for little ones! It either wanted to be gnarly but was forced to be family-friendly or should have been family-friendly but misconstrued how to walk the tightrope Gremlins danced on.

The real ugliest bit is that The End of Oak Street, seemingly by design, is pro-isolationism. It argues that for your own safety, you should watch from your window as monsters tear apart your neighbors. Don’t communicate with others. Don’t pool your resources. Don’t think your way through a crisis. Believe that a divine power will save you and worry only about yourself.

I was disgusted by this film. Not by dinosaur murders but by the vacant hole where its humanity should be.

This one is in conversation with A Quiet Place, another movie promoting pro-daddy isolation. But this is worse in that none of it is well-made or well-conceived. I am truly, genuinely, really shocked at how many critics and filmgoers seem okay with this mess. As much as it so obviously longed to be Spielbergian, the only connection that it will have to that dude’s filmography is that it is worse than Disclosure Day.

Grade = F

Other Critical Voices to Consider

Kelechi Ehenulo at Movie Marker says “For all its originality and freshness, under better direction and a more committed script, its meaty concept would have given something to shout about.”

Shakyl Lambert at CGMagazine says “The End of Oak Street is a great late-summer surprise. It’s exactly the kind of modernized old-school blockbuster that knows exactly what it is, and is perfectly content being the wild roller-coaster ride it is, and nothing else.”

Cait Kennedy at Simply Cinema says “The greatest strength of The End of Oak Street is its narrowed focus. A single family’s fight to survive 48-hours in Jurassic Hell. There’s a sort of bleak, pessimistic realism to the Pratt family’s brand of ‘rugged individualism.’”