Both major releases this week are dinosaur-forward, so as usual I'll start with a disclaimer: any movie with dinosaurs starts at an advantage with me. Take what I say about any dinosaur movie with a grain of salt.
First up is the sci-fi adventure The End of Oak Street, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell of the chilling It Follows. The time is 1982; the place is suburban Michigan.The cast is high-powered: Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) live with their daughter (Maisy Stella), son (Christian Convery) and scrappy dog. It's a troubled relationship. Denise is an aspiring writer who dreams of escaping to the big city; Greg's hiding the fact that he's been laid off and is delivering pizza.
Then one day some sort of time warp transports a circular chunk of the suburbs millions of years into the past, plopping it down in a swampy jungle in the Mesozoic. The Oak Street area wakes up to find the neighborhood crawling with dinosaurs and other prehistoric terrors. The characters struggle to survive, and try to figure out if there's a way back to the present.
There are some rip-snorting action episodes; one involving a sledge hammer is particularly good. The raptors and carnosaurs make a freaky sight against the suburban backdrop. The best passages may be early on, as Mitchell teases us with half-glimpsed menaces and eerie overheard sounds.
Although there is some macabre comedy, even some mild gore, Mitchell keeps the tone light; there's a sense in which we're not playing for keeps. The flavor, in keeping with the period, is that of early Spielberg or Steven King, and the magical suburbia milieu suggest hints of earlier sci-fi influences like Twilight Zone. Oak Street seems only a block or two from Rod Serling's Maple Street.
It's sort of funny how these people's interpersonal squabbles and resentments continue to bubble up, even after attacks by huge predatory reptiles. But it's probably also realistic.
Next up is Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie, in which the canine public-safety team gets lost in a storm at sea and runs aground on an island full of dinosaurs. You can almost hear the sound of money flowing into the box office.
The island quickly becomes a mecca for scientists, but also for fortune hunters, including the scheming Humdinger (voiced by Ron Pardo). As with the earlier films in this series based on Keith Chapman's Canadian TV cartoon, this probably isn't something you need to see if you don't have a six-year-old who demands it, unless maybe you're a hardcore dinosaur movie completist. The characters' voices and personalitites aren't very distinct--the Dalmatian Marshall (Carter Young) is clumsy; that's about as much rich characterization as we get.
But if you do end up at it, you shouldn't find it too obnoxious. There are some becoming self-effacing gags, and despite visual references that crib from the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies to Peter Jackson's King Kong to The Lion King, it's still imaginative.
Above all--and despite its anti-cat bias--the movie has a good heart. The message is that it's okay to make mistakes. The dinosaurs here aren't the bad guys; the Paw Patrol works to protect them. A new pup makes his feature debut here, an inventor named Rex (Hayden Chamberlain) who has a disability.
Chamberlain is one of several cast members who are replacments for earlier voice actors. Presumably the approach of adolescence gives these performers a short shelf life.
