Set in the 1980s while emanating Steven Spielberg vibes from the 1990s, the mostly entertaining “The End of Oak Street” hearkens back to the crowd-pleasing blockbusters of yesteryear. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell has crafted an unashamed Twilight Zone meets Jurassic Park throwback. But Mitchell throws in just enough of his own original flourishes to make this is more than some lazy Spielberg impression. It still has its issues, but it also has its fun.

“The End of Oak Street” is the kind of proudly preposterous popcorn entertainment that has the end goal of taking its audience on a no-nonsense, creature-filled thrill ride. And it mostly succeeds in doing that. It’s a smorgasbord of genre conventions, tapping into everything including science fiction, domestic drama, and even survival horror. Just don’t go in expecting it to make much sense. In fact, by the end, making sense seemed to be the least of its worries.

Mitchell’s story is set in the summer of 1982 and kicks off with the neighborhood of Flowervale gathering for a block party. It’s a nice introduction to the people of Oak Street, most importantly the Platt family. Ewan McGregor plays Greg Platt, a down-on-his-luck husband and father who recently lost job yet hasn’t mustered the courage to tell his family. His wife Denise (Anne Hathaway) is a talented writer who has backburnered her ambitions to raise a family.

Greg and Denise put on a good show, but their marriage has hit a rough patch. And their bookish daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) and their sensitive son Brian (Christian Convery) are starting to notice. As Greg pretends to deliver pizzas for “some extra money”, Denise is secretly writing a novel in the basement. Neither are willing to deal with their secrets. He would rather drown them with swigs of whiskey from his hidden stash in the garage. She pours her feelings out on the pages of her book.

Outside of Greg and Denise’s semi-buried personal struggles, the family live a pretty normal life. But with one blinding flash of white light, their idyllic 1980s suburb is whisked away to the Jurassic Period some 250 million years into the past. And yes, I means the entire neighborhood. Of course the Platts aren’t immediately aware of what has happened and the movie takes a little too much time revealing it to them. The first hint comes when they travel to end of their street only to find it dead-end at a massive chasm. But the real teller comes during their first of many encounters with…you guessed it…a dinosaur.

The real fun begins here as the film finally kicks into gear. It’s easy to enjoy such a bonkers premise when the movie operates with such self-awareness. Mitchell has a field day conceiving new ways for dinosaurs to terrorize a superb. The effects are pretty impressive and they’re instrumental in building much of the excitement and tension. They also emphasize the film’s surprisingly nasty edge which is seen in a handful of delightfully gruesome dino kills.

While the fun-factor is a huge positive, “The End of Oak Street” isn’t without its issues. Mitchell throws in a couple of storylines that are underdeveloped to the point of being uninteresting. There’s a strange bully bit involving Brian that all but vanishes until it pops back up again at the most baffling time. Then there is the new neighbor Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis) who tags along with the Platts after her parents are devoured off screen somewhere. She adds a ham-fisted romantic angle to the story that feels clumsily tacked on. And it diverts the movie away from doing what it does best.

The movie also employs nearly every trope you can list to go along with an assortment of side character archetypes. By no means do these gripes break the bank. But they do strip away some of the originality. And it’s compounded by an ending that is content with surface-level explanations of what is actually happening. You could nitpick several other things about “The End of Oak Street”, but in the end it delivers exactly what it promises. And it does so with more than enough humor and heart to go along with the wild and wacky spectacle.

VERDICT – 3.5 STARS