‘The End of Oak Street’ is Entertainingly Derivative

Of the two Steven Spielberg movies that’ve come out this year, I enjoyed “The End of Oak Street” more. “Oak Street” was not, I should say, actually directed by the soon-to-be-80-year-old blockbuster titan. That credit goes to David Robert Mitchell, best known for the generationally influential stalker-horror movie “It Follows” (2014). But Spielberg’s moviemaking genetics are so thoroughly embedded in the film, down to the heavenly way the sun casts down on the titular stretch of could-be-anywhere suburb in the opening scenes and how its histrionic Michael Giacchino score tells us to emote, that one could say he’s, genealogically speaking, responsible for it.

Set in the same year “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” came out, “The End of Oak Street” is like a Frankenstein’d-together Spielberg project. (If it weren’t as well made and fun, you’d be readier to give credence to suspicions that it were the result of prompting AI to hallucinate its own Spielberg film, and spend more time complaining about mainstream cinema’s ever-worsening preference for nostalgic familiarity over originality.) It marries two modes with which child-of-divorce Spielberg has become associated by standard-setting default: An average suburban neighborhood life-changingly forced to deal with the extraordinary; famished, big-toothed dinosaurs miraculously given the opportunity to tear into soft human flesh. Unlike “Jurassic Park” (1993), “Oak Street” doesn’t get into granular detail about how the latter is possible. The nuclear family the movie focuses on — made up of Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway as the parents, Christian Convery and Maisy Stella as the kids, and a pet Australian cattle dog named Starbuck I couldn’t believe makes it to the end — simply wakes up one morning, after noticing some blinding flashes of light a few nights before, and notices that a good chunk of their neighborhood has time-traveled back millions of years.

The air is suffocatingly humid. The street’s tranquil hum has been replaced by ceaseless jungle-like chirps, moans, and screeches. Everywhere there are tall, lush plants that, not long ago, would never have shot up in this particular area, not least because they’d only just been extinct for an epic stretch of time. Both uncanny changes would be tolerably strange if the era’s fauna didn’t come with it. Now lurking behind seemingly every house and particularly massive bush is a predatory dinosaur that cannot resist a mouthful of human, much like the way a dog continues gobbling a bag of kibble until their stomach reaches capacity.

Mitchell, who also wrote the movie, successfully squeezes dark comedy out of “Oak Street”’s built-in surreality. Cruel karma comes for an unreasonably grouchy neighbor (P.J. Byrne) courtesy of a gang of pitiless sharp-beaked pterodactyls. An extended moment of levity sees Hathaway and McGregor taking a break from fearing for their lives so that they can laugh at the sight of a couple of woolly, house-size beasts taking the edge off with a little procreation. But otherwise, the movie pretty relentlessly introduces new creatures to outrun, the stakes heightening as escape from this inexplicable hell on earth gets farther away.

“Oak Street” probably could have snipped about 20 minutes off its runtime. The constancy of nerve-jangling “uh ohs” toys with monotony. I could have done with a lot less of Convery whining about the unknown whereabouts of his beloved on-the-loose dog, and the overarching, facile idea that this batty form of adversity has the potential to save the deteriorating marriage of Hathaway and McGregor, the former of whom is so sick of her husband’s white lies and passivity that her only real pleasure these days is nightly cranking out a book, in the basement, through which she can fantasize about a happier life. (This is, unfortunately, not the kind of movie that wants her to end up a creatively fulfilled divorcée as much as I did.)

But the movie, like Mitchell’s “It Follows” — whose conceit was also built on trying to escape the inescapable — generally delivers on its minimalist concept the way you’re craving as you’re walking in. And it’s a worthy showcase for Hathaway, who has a Barbara Stanwyck-ian ability to make a movie seem even better than it is. “Oak Street” is, astonishingly, the fourth of five movies she’s appearing in this year. 2026’s miseries continue to churn, but watching one of our great living actresses flex her versatility has been a consistent source of joy.

Will another movie arrive in theaters this year with as tormented a backstory as “Coyote vs. Acme” behind it? Seamlessly merging live action with animation à la “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), the comedy was supposed to come out in 2023. Then its studio, Warner Bros. Pictures — the same one backing “The End of Oak Street” — unceremoniously nixed it from its release schedule for, unbelievably, tax-write-off purposes. The inevitable public backlash was so ferocious that Warner executives decided to, only slightly, course-correct. They permitted the filmmakers to try selling their latest achievements to other distributors, albeit not without stymieing bids from Netflix and Paramount and threatening to, again, shelve the project and let proverbial dust pile.

Now here we are, more than three years later, able to see “Coyote vs. Acme” after Ketchup Entertainment heroically secured the film’s rights. All this soap-operatic lead-up unavoidably sets one not just up for supremely high expectations — those involved with the production regularly declared that the movie stacked among their favorite projects — but also an impulse to feverishly champion a film that had nearly fallen victim to greedy, censorious corporate obstruction. That “Coyote vs. Acme” is only very good — a trait few mainstream movies can these days claim — comes with a misplaced shiver of disappointment that its originally planned rollout certainly wouldn’t have come with.

You can now see why the movie was an easy target for avaricious overlords. Why not bask in a creativity-wasting cashout at the expense of a movie whose core conflict involves a corporation treating the customers fattening their pockets with contempt? The said vulnerable demographic is the world’s cartoon denizens, who live alongside flesh-and-blood people with relative harmony. Their struggles are represented by the permanently salivating Wile E. Coyote, who decides, early in the movie, to sue Acme, the company that’s evolved from exclusively shilling animated anvils to pretty much everything on a store’s shelves. He has, as Looney Tunes fans know, forever been hoarding the business’s pratfall-inducing gizmos to help him finally catch and then chow down on the lightning-strike-fast Road Runner. Then he has a come-to-Jesus moment. Isn’t it awfully odd that something as apparently innocuous as shoes with springed soles blow up like sparked dynamite after just a few determined strides?

Wile E. Coyote lawyers up. His representation is an in-over-his-head Albuquerque billboard attorney named Kevin (Will Forte), who gets much assistance from his go-getter, new-to-law niece, Paige (Seattle actress Lana Condor). With his human helpers he uncovers an Acme-sanctioned conspiracy revealing that there is, in fact, a reason Acme’s many cartoon products have such a high rate of hair-singeing and house-exploding user error.

The film’s writer, Samy Burch — most recognized for her Oscar-nominated screenplay for the polar-opposite “May December” (2023) — effortlessly synthesizes straight-ahead caper-movie shenanigans with the over-the-top physical comedy central to the Looney Tunes brand. The animation and visual effects, done by DNEG and Duncan Studios, give ingrained cartoon characters 3D makeovers without polishing out their hand-drawn charm. “Coyote vs. Acme,” much like the last Looney Tunes movie, the great-but-underseen “The Day the Earth Blew Up” (2024), is a very fun new expansion of a nearly century-old franchise that also doesn’t add much dimension to known-and-loved IP. It’s ridiculous that we had to wait this long to see it, but having the good guys win is always worth the wait.

Movie Love is 425’s film column. In 2023, it won first place and in 2026 won second place in editorial & commentary in the magazine category of SPJ Western Washington’s Excellence in Journalism Awards.