Neighborhood Watch

by Mike McGranaghan

Neighborhood Watch feels like a crime drama that someone rewrote to be a mismatched buddy comedy. The movie cannot figure out what it primarily wants to be, so it awkwardly veers back and forth between grim plot developments and comedic bickering among the two leads. No surprise, then, that it works on neither level.

Simon McNally (Jack Quaid) has severe mental health problems. While roaming around the city, he witnesses a young woman being abducted by a guy in a van. Partially because of his illness, the cops don’t believe him when he tries to file a report. Simon therefore turns to his next-door neighbor, bitter retired college security chief Ed Deerman (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). He wants nothing to do with Simon at first, but the lure of solving a potential crime eventually hooks him.

Sean Farley’s screenplay thinks it’s funny to have the blunt Ed call Simon derogatory names like “Screw Loose.” We’re also asked to laugh at this clearly ill guy experiencing delusions, having anxiety attacks, and fighting off bouts of word salad. None of those jokes land because there’s nothing to them other than mockery. Simon also has “movie mental illness,” wherein his condition abruptly manifests itself in whatever form feeds the joke or adds a necessary complication to the scene.

When it isn’t making fun of the character’s issues, Neighborhood Watch falls into some ugly subject matter that’s diametrically opposed to the lighthearted tone it often takes. Human trafficking is a pretty serious topic that doesn’t deserve to be shoved into a picture that tries to surround it with humor. Worse, the movie has no perspective on trafficking, other than that it’s bad, which we already know. The kidnapping victim is a mere prop to drive the plot, meaning her misery makes no impression.

For a mismatched partner story to work, it needs to have characters who are amusing, portrayed by actors who display comic chemistry together. The characters here are one-dimensional, and Quaid and Morgan fail to create the sort of firecracker dynamic that, for example, Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte had in 48 HRS. Consequently, Neighborhood Watch simply flounders around for 92 minutes, trying to do several things at once and doing none of them successfully.

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