Neighborhood Watch

by Hope Madden

Director Duncan Skiles’s latest, Neighborhood Watch, delivers a tense and unpretentious thriller about a young man debilitated by childhood trauma who witnesses a kidnapping. When the police don’t believe him, he teams up with a disgraced campus security guard to find the victim.

Jack Quaid (Novocaine, Companion) is Simon, so crippled by his childhood that he hallucinates, his every thought accompanied by a running commentary in the voice of his abusive father. He can’t convince the police of what he’s seen, and in his desperation, drags his unpleasant and reluctant neighbor Ed (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) into the mystery.

Neighborhood Watch is a buddy comedy without the comedy, and it is funny how stripping away the humor allows the relationship between these two lonely men to breathe in very human ways.   

Morgan’s a spitfire, but one you recognize—your dad, your uncle, your neighbor, somebody who’s fighting the feeling of uselessness with condescension and inappropriate action. It would have been very easy to overplay Ed. Instead, Morgan nails a good-humored bitterness that gives way, little by little, to compassion and genuine usefulness.

Quaid works fiercely against easy, tropey characterization. There’s nothing cloying or patronizing in the performance. Rather, Simon is a frustrated, intelligent, decent person trying to do what’s right. The unselfconscious humility in both performances allows even the most overwritten moments of bonding to feel earned.

Sean Farley’s script includes a few too many plot conveniences, to the point that sometimes Neighborhood Watch feels like a network drama. Except that our focal points are not the police investigators, but two damaged nobodies with nothing better to do. Something about that helps the film transcend cliché.

Neighborhood Watch is an example of direction and performance elevating a script. The plot itself is far from unique. Indeed, its central mystery has become Hollywood shorthand for feel good heroism.

But Skiles looks past knee jerk, self-congratulatory action in favor of context, his camera lingering on the blight of old suburbia. In this unglamorous world of perms and coupons, polyester and bus passes, two losers that life passed by just try to do one good thing. The humble simplicity is surprisingly moving.