See It Or Skip It? - The End of Oak Street

FIRST 34:30: Spoiler-Free Review with our See It/Skip It Verdict
AFTER 34:30: Full Spoiler Review

It’s another edition of See It or Skip It and this time Ian is joined by James as they head to The End of Oak Street — David Robert Mitchell’s strange new collision of suburban family drama, science-fiction mystery and dinosaur-filled survival adventure.

Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead the Platt family, whose perfectly ordinary neighbourhood suddenly finds itself ripped out of suburbia and deposited somewhere very, very different. But does throwing a family, their house and apparently their entire street into the impossible make for a thrilling original blockbuster — or is The End of Oak Street trying to cram too many different movies into the same 99 minutes?

Ian and James dig into whether Mitchell — the filmmaker behind It Follows — can make the leap into big-budget spectacle without losing the sense of unease and mystery that made his earlier work so distinctive. Does the film actually have something interesting to say about family, home and what happens when everything familiar is suddenly stripped away? Or are we really just here to watch Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor run away from dinosaurs?

How well do Hathaway and McGregor sell the central family dynamic? Do Maisy Stella and Christian Convery give the younger Platts enough personality of their own? And when the film finally starts explaining exactly what has happened to Oak Street, does the answer make the mystery more satisfying — or was wondering what the hell was going on more fun than actually finding out?

The pair also get into the film’s action, Michael Giacchino’s score, its use of IMAX-scale spectacle and that wonderfully odd mixture of Spielbergian adventure, creature feature and domestic drama. Is this the kind of original studio blockbuster people keep insisting Hollywood doesn’t make anymore — and, if so, will audiences actually turn up when somebody finally makes one?

Can a movie about a suburban family transported into the unknown balance genuine emotional stakes with the simple pleasure of DINOSAURS? Does David Robert Mitchell successfully go big without losing what makes his filmmaking interesting? And perhaps most importantly: once your entire street has been transported through space and time, does the homeowners’ association still have jurisdiction?

All this and more in this week’s See It or Skip It review of The End of Oak Street — and of course, Ian and James will let you know if you should SEE IT or SKIP IT.