The End of Oak Street is a decent August movie
Everybody knows by now that there are two ‘dead zones’ for movies in a calendar year. One of them is February, after the year-end holiday movies and Oscar hopefuls have been released. The other one is August, when the summer blockbusters have run their course. Exceptions exist, sure. But for every Guardians of the Galaxy, there are dozens of ‘The Meg/The Meg 2’. So yeah, this is a close to a Hollywood constant as you are likely to find (and one of the reasons I am so fearful to be hopeful on Coyote vs Acme). And that’s why The End of Oak Street was a small delight.
She is literally in everything in 2026
The End of Oak Street is set in 1982 Anytown, USA, so Gen X will find plenty of rememberberries to give us nostalgic warm fuzzies. Music, technology, TV, pulled up cheapo tube socks…all of it.
The End of Oak Street stars Anne Hathaway (because of course it does)and Ewan McGregor as Denise and Greg Platt, the quintessential happy family. The Platt family of four, looking oh-so-happy to the casual onlooker, are hiding many of the common marital problems that, if ignored, often lead to tragedy. The movie spends a brief amount of screen time setting this up before thrusting the Platt family into a sci-fi time travel terror-adventure. The cause of said sci-fi time travel is short on exposition and probably a lot of the reason this movie got relegated to August release. What saves this movie is the excellent acting ability of Hathaway who is in no less than 6 movies this year. Eat your heart out Holland and Zendaya.
What follows is a pretty tepid story of what survival would look like if an average neighborhood got scienced into prehistoric earth. In an all-too common these days role-swap, goofy ‘hyuk-hyuk’ husband and pragmatic girl-boss mom keeping the family from going off the rails and, you know…dying. We’re seeing quite a bit of girl-bossing from Hathaway in 2026. I’m wondering if she doesn’t have some kind of rider to her contracts. ‘Must include’ a certain amount of it in any of her roles. Just an observation and thought.
Think Sharknado but much less silly
The concept of The End of Oak Street is a decent little twist on some fairly well (time)traveled sci-fi territory. And, if not for the talents of Hathaway and McGregor, this could easily have been a low-budget offering on the Sci Fi channel. As it sits, I was not expecting greatness so I was not disappointed. The score is pretty reflective of that.
I’m deducting points now.
Aside from the girl-bossing and emasculation of McGregor, there was very little wokeness in The End of Oak Street. It sucks that we are now becoming accustomed to looking for it, but here we are. You could sense very early on that there might be some LGBTQ being shoehorned in. It definitely wasn’t as ham-fisted as it was in Stranger Things. But it was equally unnecessary to anything and clearly there as an appeasement. There was other subtle emasculation of the male child of the Platt family. In fact, now that I think about it, every power lead in The End of Oak Street was a female and every weak or annoying character was male.
All that said, I didn’t hate The End of Oak Street even with all the warts, story shortcomings and woke eye-roll moments. What started out as a north of 3 score has, on further reflection, dropped to a tepid 2.8. I probably should have gone to see Brink of War (another Gen X 80’s movie with a very different tone). Oh well. We live with our choices and make the best of them. My advice to you on The End of Oak Street…watch it but wait for streaming. It won’t be long.
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