April 25, 2025
by Carla Hay

Directed by Duncan Skiles
Culture Representation: Taking place in Alabama, the dramatic film “Neighborhood Watch” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A mentally ill man witnesses a young woman being kidnapped and teams up with a grouchy neighbor to solve the mystery of the kidnapping.
Culture Audience: “Neighborhood Watch” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jack Quaid, but this limp and unrealistic movie will disappoint fans of crime-solving stories.

The slow-moving drama “Neighborhood Watch” is tainted with unfunny jokes and a tacky portrayal of mental illness. It’s a wretched and uninspired story of two mismatched neighbors who team up to solve a kidnapping mystery. None of it looks believable.
Directed by Duncan Skiles and written by Sean Farley, “Neighborhood Watch” (formerly titled “Nowhere Men”) takes place in various cities in and near Birmingham, Alabama. And even though “Neighborhood Watch” was filmed on location in Alabama, almost no one in the movie sounds like they’re from Alabama. That’s not the only phony-looking thing about “Neighborhood Watch,” which is filled with too many nonsense scenes that insult viewers’ intelligence. It’s really a shame because the movie has some well-known cast members who are capable of doing much better work.
“Neighborhood Watch” begins by showing a man in his early 30s named Simon McNally (played by Jack Quaid) going to interview for a server job at Flapjack’s Diner of Birmingham. Simon (who lives in the suburban city of Homewood) has a mental illness that is not named in the movie. However, he seems to have schizophrenia because he hears voices in his head that insult and berate him. He also hallucinates seeing a disheveled and shirtless elderly man (played by Jonathan Fuller and voiced by William Reyes), who appears when Simon gets nervous or afraid.
The interview is a disaster. The manager (played by Melanie Jeffcoat) who is interviewing Simon looks at his job application and asks Simon why he hasn’t been employed for the past 10 years. Simon is honest and tells her that he has medical problems and was in a hospital. He then nervously hides one of his wrists, which has cutting scars. The manager notices the scars anyway.
Simon can sense that he’s not making a good impression. But things get worse. During the interview, the voices in his head begin again, and he hallucinates seeing the old man. Simon then shouts, “The color of this lady is do not sleep tonight!” The manager asks if Simon is okay, even though he’s clearly not okay.
Simon denies that anything is wrong, but it’s too late. Based on the manager’s reaction, Simon knows he’s not getting the job. It’s later revealed that when Simon gets very anxious, he blurts out “word salad” sentences that make no sense. He later says his brain feels scrambled when these “word salad” episodes happen. Simon is usually passive but he has a nasty, violent and unpredictable temper that comes out in random moments.
Simon lives in a house with his older sister DeeDee McNally (played by Malin Akerman), a third-year nursing student who works part-time at a beauty salon. DeeDee is having financial problems (she’s avoiding phone calls that she gets from a mortgage company), but she hides details of these problems from Simon. DeeDee will only tell Simon that he needs to get a job because they need the money. Much later in the movie, DeeDee mentions that she gets only $200 a month in state disability payments for being Simon’s guardian.
Meanwhile, Ed Deerman (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is an unemployed grouch who lives next door to Simon and DeeDee. Ed, who lives alone, has an addiction to online gambling that has left him almost financially broke. He also has health issues: He has a prescription for Rampiril that he refuses to take, and he has an enlarged prostate, but he ignores advice to get medical help.
One day, Ed shows up unannounced at his former job at Kenzer Community College, where Ed worked as senior director of security and surveillance operations. Ed has been replaced by a pompous egomaniac named Jeremy (played by Jack Klock), who is as problematic as Ed, but for different reasons that are revealed later in the movie. It’s soon shown why aggressive and stubborn Ed has the type of personality that got him fired.
Ed is at a school cafeteria when he sees a male student (played by Will Deusner) stealing some muffins and bagels in a salad-bar serving area. Ed maces the student, hauls him into the security office, tells Jeremy that he caught the student stealing food from the school cafeteria, and demands that Jeremy call the police to have the student arrested. Jeremy refuses because Ed overreacted by illegally macing the student, who is let go with a warning.
Ed then berates Jeremy for not doing a good job and complains about the low quality of locks on campus. Jeremy responds by giving Ed this blistering comment: “There are two types of failures in this world: has-beens and never-wases. And you are a never-was. I think it would be best for everyone if you don’t come around here for a while.”
“Neighborhood Watch” juxtaposes these two introductory scenes of Simon and Ed to make it obvious that even though meek Simon and domineering Ed seem to be complete opposites, they are both sad sacks who are “misunderstood” and rejected by people around them. It’s all so formulaic because you know “Neighborhood Watch” is going to be the type of movie that has stereotypes of two clashing personalities who end up spending time with each other and have to find a way to work together for a common goal. And in movies about two people trying to solve a crime together, it’s become quite the cliché to have one of the people as an older cynic, while the other person is naïve and less-experienced.
One day, while a dejected Simon is walking down a street near his house, he sees a young prostitute (played by Chatham Kennedy), whose name is later revealed to Anya, getting pushed around in an alley by her pimp (played by Billy Culbertson), whose name is later revealed to be Walsh. Simon then sees Anya getting shoved into the back of the van against her will. Simon hears voices in his head taunting him about being too wimpy to do anything about this crime. He decides to prove the voices in his head wrong by running after the van. The van drives away, but Simon memorizes the license plate number.
Simon doesn’t have a car and apparently doesn’t have a cell phone because he’s never seen using a cell phone in the movie. Instead of going to the police right away, Simon goes to Ed’s house to ask for a car ride to try to find the kidnapped woman. It’s in this scene that it’s revealed why Simon is a pariah in the neighborhood.
Ed rudely refuses to help Simon because Ed says he still remembers when Simon punched two police officers in the middle of the road, and there were reporters in the neighborhood for two days straight after that incident. Ed angrily asks Simon, “Do you have any idea what that kind of publicity does to neighborhood property values?”
Simon then goes to the Homewood Police Department to report the crime. The official who takes the report is Detective Glover (played by Cecile Cubiló), who looks very uninterested. Simon gives vague descriptions of the kidnapper and the kidnapping victim and admits he didn’t get a good look at the kidnapper’s face. However, Simon remembers the license plate number of the van. Detective Glover takes all the information and asks Simon for his date of birth.
After he leaves, Detective Glover does a background check on Simon and finds out that he has an arrest record for disorderly conduct and he was sentenced to a psychiatric facility. Detective Glover assumes that Simon’s mental illness lowers his credibility and thinks he could be lying about witnessing a kidnapping. Later, when Simon calls Detective Glover to ask if there’s an update on the case, she tells him that the license plate number that he gave to her was registered to a vehicle that was pulled over that morning in a place that was 300 miles away. She makes it clear that she doesn’t believe Simon.
Simon then goes back to Ed and begs for help again because Simon remembers that Ed worked in security or law enforcement. Simon tells Ed that the police won’t help because the police don’t believe Simon. Ed is a wannabe police detective, so he agrees to help Simon only find out who owns the kidnapper van, based on the license plate information that Simon has.
Vehicle ownership based on a license plate number is restricted information that is protected by certain privacy laws and can only be accessed by certain agencies and not by the general public. Ed warns Simon that the license plate information that Simon remembers could be faulty, such as the number five could be the letter “s,” or the number one could be the letter “i,” or any other variables, such as the license plate could have been stolen.
And this is when “Neighborhood Watch” really starts to get idiotic. A mild spoiler alert for anyone who wants to waste time watching this mind-numbing film: It takes literally half of this 92-minute movie for Simon and Ed to investigate the license plate number. They do many stupid things to drag out this bungled search, including going to the local Department of Motor Vehicles, where Ed thinks he can get this information from a DMV clerk, just by pretending to still be a security officer from Kenzer Community College.
Ed constantly acts like he’s extremely knowledgeable about detective work. And yet, Ed constantly leads Simon to commit crimes as part of their “sleuthing,” where they make all types of moronic mistakes, such as break into places where they leave their fingerprints and DNA everywhere. There’s a running “joke” in the movie that Ed thinks he can identify when someone is lying if they blink too much or don’t blink at all when they’re talking.
As for the characters of Simon and Ed: Quaid and Morgan have done these types of characters many times before—Quaid tends to play insecure and neurotic characters, Morgan tends to play gruff and bossy characters—so “Neighborhood Watch” is just more typecasting for Quaid and Morgan. By sheer coincidence, Quaid is in another 2025 movie where he also depicts a man with medical issues who’s turns into a vigilante while looking for a kidnapped woman: “Novocaine,” which is a far superior film to the sluggish “Neighborhood Watch.”
Almost nothing is revealed about Ed’s personal life. There’s a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment that is a very tiny clue. Shortly after Ed agrees to help Simon, there’s a scene in Ed’s home where Ed shows Simon that he uses a clock as a hiding place. One of the things hidden in the clock is a Kenzer Community College photo ID for a middle-aged woman named Kathy Deerman, whose job title is listed as director of dining services. It might explain why Ed was hanging out at a Kenzer cafeteria, but whoever Kathy is remains an unanswered question. It would be easy to assume that Kathy is Ed’s former wife.
Akerman’s DeeDee character is treated like a bookend: She’s only in the first part and last part of “Neighborhood Watch,” a cinematic dud that gets increasingly ridiculous—and not in an enjoyable way. There’s nothing special about the acting performances, while the movie’s screenplay and direction wallow in ineptitude. Simon’s mental illness is used as a story gimmick. Ultimately, this dreadful and boring movie is just a tired parade of predictability and nonsense.
RLJE Films released “Neighborhood Watch” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on April 25, 2025.