"The End Of Oak Street" Is A Bait And Switch And I Walked Out Of The Theater

I just stormed out of The End Of Oak Street, with popcorn still in the bag. This was forty minutes of my life I will never get back and eighteen dollars I could have spent on almost anything else, including nothing. SPOILERS AHEAD, and you’re welcome, because I just saved you a trip.

Halfway through the movie they kill the dad and injure the son so the mom can become a female warrior. That’s the whole film in a nutshell. Everything before that is throat-clearing, and everything after that is a different movie than the one they sold me in the trailer.

THE TRAILER SOLD ME A FAMILY

Here’s why I’m mad. I don’t pay for movies anymore. I stopped years ago, for exactly this reason. But the marketing on this one had a dad, a mom, a son, a daughter, a station wagon, and DINOSAURS coming down a suburban street. A family holding the line together while the world falls apart. That’s a movie I’ll drive to. That’s a movie I’ll pay a babysitter for. So I paid. My mistake.

THE RED FLAGS WERE THERE. I IGNORED THEM.

Looking back, the movie tells you what it thinks of you in the first ten minutes. I chose not to listen. Learn from me.

The couple bickers from frame one. Not banter. Not two people who like each other giving each other grief. Bickering. She’s clipped, he’s defensive, and the script treats this as the natural resting state of marriage.

Dad got laid off weeks ago. Of course he did. You cannot have a competent father in a movie like this. He has to arrive pre-broken so nobody in the audience gets confused about who’s going to be useless later.

Mom is secretly writing a book about how miserable she is being a wife and mother. SECRETLY. Behind her family’s back. And the film frames this as her brave inner life instead of what it obviously is.

She acts like she’s too good for all of them. Every scene, she’s the only adult in the room. Every scene, her face says she settled.

She guilts him over one drink. A man loses his job, the world is ending, he pours two fingers of something, and his wife turns it into a referendum on his character. The camera holds on her disapproval like we’re supposed to nod along.

The son cannot hit a GIANT DINOSAUR standing directly in front of him with a bow and arrow. A target roughly the size of a delivery truck. He misses. Repeatedly. It’s played for a wince.

Mom never misses with the rifle. Not once. No training, no arc, no scene where she learns. She just picks it up and she’s Annie Oakley.

THE WOMANSPLAINING SEQUENCE

Then comes the exposition scene, and this is where I started shifting in my seat.

Mom and the daughter lay out the entire plot for us. The situation, the plan, the stakes, the map. They are lucid, informed, and correct about everything.

Dad babbles. He interrupts with a question that’s already been answered. He looks confused. The daughter explains it to him a second time, slower, and the theater laughed.

I did not laugh. I’ve seen this scene in forty movies and the joke is always the same joke and the target is always the same target.

THEN THEY CHANGE THE CAST

The family is white, which the movie clearly considers a problem it needs to solve. So they adopt a mixed-race girl who’s lost her parents.

Understand me: I have nothing against the character or the actress, who’s fine. But watch what the writers actually did with the roster. We came in with a balanced family. Father, mother, son, daughter. Two and two. By the middle of the second act it’s three females and one boy, and the boy is wounded and can’t shoot.

That’s not a story choice. That’s a headcount.

THE LIBRARIAN WITH THE SHOTGUN

And then, God help me, the LIBRARIAN shows up.

Cardigan. Glasses. Shotgun. She saves the women, racks the slide, and delivers a female empowerment battle cry to the ceiling while the score swells.

That’s where I left. Row H, aisle seat, out the door, and I didn’t look back at the screen once.

THIS IS THE PART THAT ACTUALLY BOTHERS ME

I want to be clear about what my objection is, because somebody’s going to say I can’t handle a woman with a gun.

I love a mother defending her kids. Sarah Connor works. Ripley works. Give me a woman who fights for her family and I’ll cheer until I’m hoarse.

That is not what this movie does. This movie cannot make the mother strong without making the father dead and the son crippled. It cannot let her win unless the men lose first. It doesn’t build her up. It clears the room.

A family in a crisis is one of the great engines in all of storytelling, and this script threw it in the woodchipper by the halfway mark so it could deliver a message it was too cowardly to put in the trailer.

They knew. That’s the part that gets me. They knew who’d buy a ticket to a movie about a family and dinosaurs on a suburban street, and they sold it to us anyway.

THE VERDICT

Bait-and-switch garbage like this is the exact reason I stopped paying for movies in the first place. I made an exception. I got punished for it. Consider the lesson relearned.

Maybe the back half redeems it. I doubt it, and I’m not going back to find out, and neither should you.

MY ADVICE: SAVE YOUR MONEY.

Rating: One arrow. It missed.

Follow Byl Holte on X for his hot takes on movies and pop culture.

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