Jack Quaid and Jeffrey Dean Morgan make Neighborhood Watch worth Following Down Mystery’s Mean Streets

Simon McNally (Jack Quaid) is struggling. He lives with paranoid schizophrenia, which commonly manifests as vivid auditory and visual hallucinations of his abusive father (Jonathan Fuller), and is trying to ease back into the world after an extended and involuntary hospitalization. Ed Deerman (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is struggling. He lives alone in the wake of his wife’s death and the end of his job as head of security for a local college. No one wants to see Simon because he makes them uncomfortable. No one wants to see Ed because he’s an obnoxious, self-righteous jackass. When Simon sees a young woman (Chatham Kennedy) being shoved into a van, nobody believes him, even himself. But he can’t let the possibility that someone is in danger and no one is doing anything go. Ed doesn’t believe Simon but decides to humor the kid, whom he’s always dismissed as a lunatic, because he’ll get to play cop. Neither man is a detective, but they’re the only ones looking. And someone doesn’t want them looking. 

Neighborhood Watch, directed by Duncan Skiles and written by Sean Farley, is a rock-solid small-scale mystery built on careful work from Quaid and Morgan. Simon is a thoughtful, lonely, regretful man, and more driven than he realizes. His schizophrenia does not define him, but it is a significant and at times debilitating part of his life. Skiles and Farley don’t go into extensive detail about Simon’s past, but the implications they layer in via his father’s perpetually scantily-clad hallucination are disturbing. 

Quaid’s work in portraying how Simon lives with and struggles against his schizophrenia is layered. His body language is guarded, his bad periods are at best uncomfortable and at worst scary for everyone involved, and his management strategies read as tools that Simon’s built over an often rough life. Simon’s fundamental decency and will to act are equally crucial to his character and Quaid uses them to build dynamism into the performance. He moves from self-doubt and self-hatred to clarity and determination; not a macho tough guy, but, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler’s The Simple Art of Murder, an honorable man. He steps up for someone who’d otherwise fall into oblivion.

Morgan’s Ed starts Neighborhood Watch as a lousy guy lost in himself, chasing power highs from busting college kids he no longer holds any authority over. There’s never a grand moment of redemption for him, a la Huck Finn deciding he’ll go to hell rather than leave Jim enslaved. Instead, Morgan opts to build a gradual blossoming of decency into Ed. Realizing that Simon’s right about the abduction leads Ed to see him and how he navigates the world and his illness. When Ed steps up for Simon in a crisis, Morgan makes his compassion and care genuine and decent. It’s lovely, subtle work.

Neighborhood Watch’s leads are backed by a game supporting cast, including Malin Akerman as Simon’s loving, struggling sister DeeDee. Akerman threads the needle between DeeDee’s care for her brother and her bone-deep exhaustion and frustration with how her life has turned out. She and Quaid build an uncomfortable chemistry: the McNally siblings love each other but share bitterness and grievances, and don’t have the language to bridge the gaps between them.

As for Neighborhood Watch’s central mystery, it’s alright. The strongest part of its telling revolves around the relative inexperience of the perpetrators and the investigators. The perpetrators are malign ghouls, but they’ve gotten away with their crimes because they prey on people society tries not to see and keep relatively quiet. The first time they feel the heat around the corner, they get desperate and reckless. They’re cousins to Elmore Leonard’s many villains in that their cluelessness and stupidity make them dangerous. They’re not as amusing as Snoopy’s hapless minions in Out of Sight or Justified’s Dewey Crowe, but they’re credibly dangerous. Conversely, while neither Simon nor Ed is a trained sleuth, they’re clever and driven, and as the case spirals, they get the sort of desperation that breeds creativity. Neighborhood Watch isn’t a buddy picture, but Quaid and Morgan’s chemistry and how they grow and transform it are delightful. The resolution they reach is satisfying, both dramatically and interpersonally.

Neighborhood Watch is a fine detective film, thanks primarily to Quaid and Morgan’s fine work on their own and together. It’s not an all-timer, like Evan Morgan’s hysterical, heart-ripping The Kid Detective, but it’s worthy and well worth a watch for folks who dig either of the leads and mystery heads.

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