Sometimes I get so caught up in looking for movies on Shudder that I forget my AMC+ app has an entire cinematic catalogue aside from just what the horror sub-app offers!

Recently, while tearing through my various subscriptions and looking for something to watch, I opened up AMC+. But before I got to the Shudder button, I caught myself looking at another option: a movie just straight away under the main application itself.

That’s how I came across today’s offering: Neighborhood Watch. AMC as a channel has a love affair with Jeffrey Dean Morgan thanks to his role in The Walking Dead universe. He has brought tons of eyes to their products over the years as the villain-turned-hero Negan. So it only makes sense that if AMC+ was offering an original film, they’d tap him to star in it.

The surprise, however, was seeing Jack Quaid as his costar. Quaid has already had himself a busy 2025, and by the time Neighborhood Watch released, the year was not even half over! I had not heard anything about this flick before I found it on the app, but based on the pair of stars, I decided to give it a watch. 

Neighborhood Watch sees Quaid playing Simon, a man with a traumatic past and a serious case of mental health disabilities. He’s back in society after a lengthy stint in a hospital, and he’s having a hell of a time adjusting and trying to find his way in the world. His neighbor is JDM, playing Eddie. He’s a former college campus security guard who isn’t taking well to retirement. He still sees himself as an officer for good and wants to be out where the action is.

When Simon sees a girl get attacked and thrown in a van, he is determined to save her, but no one will listen to him. No one, that is, until he brings his case to Eddie. And then the unlikely pair start hunting the culprits down.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Jack Quaid is versatile as heck. In just the current year, he has portrayed: 1) a scumbag romantic lead in a horror-ish sci-fi movie (Companion), 2) an action comedy star protagonist (Novocaine), and now 3) a mentally unwell man with no confidence and voices in his head. He is playing a lot of different roles and really building an impressive resume as a guy who can do anything. 

He really has everything down here, too, as far as physically playing the role goes. He portrays a man with no confidence even while he is possessed of what he feels is great purpose. He has poor posture, is constantly looking down, and has darting eyes. He’s not playing it too stereotypically “zany crazy”, and he comes across as all the more genuine for it. 

He has really stand-out chemistry with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, too. Morgan is playing a more defeated version of his typical character self (brash, in charge, sarcastic to the point of caustic), and his Eddie character gets on really well with Quaid’s Simon. Whether the two actors formed a truly solid rapport or the editing is fantastic enough to make them look like they did, the two get on great on screen.

+ The mood is varied, leading to a fun experience. It’s tough to blend humor into a thriller story about a mentally ill person trying to find an assaulted girl, but Neighborhood Watch does it surprisingly well. And the humor isn’t too heavy or invasive. It’s just there enough to keep the mood from ever getting too dour or dark. 

Morgan gets most of the chuckles here, as you might expect to be the case. His abrasiveness in the face of Quaid’s antics lead to a lot of the film’s best lines. Morgan is an actor that has long excelled at playing a bad-ass who has respectable comedic timing. Here he is a little less bad-ass than usual, but he keeps his comedy chops at the ready. 

– Eddie and Simon stay one step ahead of the police through plot contrivances. They aren’t particularly skilled or clever. The cops are just dumb or behind because the movie needs them to be. It’s not exactly the weakest story element in the world, but it does feel a lot of the time like things are happening just because the plot needs them to. 

We are introduced to a detective who we are never quite sure is going to be on Simon and Eddie’s side or not. When we first meet Detective Glover, she seems like a worn down officer of the law who doesn’t have time for Simon’s nonsense, and she refuses to really look into what he offers her–at least not on the same level as Eddie proves to be. But then she quickly becomes a pseudo-antagonist who hears about the duo’s escapades at the DMV and becomes hot on their heels.

It just feels a bit inconsistent for her character. Is she too lazy to care about Simon? Or is she a strict detective bound to do her job? Perhaps it’s all meant to be a statement on how people with mental health issues are treated by the police in America. In which case, I suppose it does a good job at that. But I felt a bit of whiplash from her shift. 

– Malin Ackerman feels like wasted casting as Simon’s sister because she really only has two or three scenes and isn’t given much to do. I’d like to have seen her have an expanded role since they bothered to get a relatively noteworthy star. It’s the case of “just because you can get a bigger name star for a role doesn’t necessarily mean you should”. 

Not that I’m complaining that much; I typically enjoy Ackerman on screen, and it’s good to see her here. But you end up wishing that at some point she would join the boys on their caper and end up more involved than she gets. She’s essentially a stereotypical female character here. She’s a woman, so she must have the nursing skills needed to stitch up Eddie after a scrap! And… that’s pretty much all she has to do. 

OVERALL – 3.5/5

Neighborhood Watch is a fun story that has some really impressive acting from Quaid and even better chemistry between himself and Morgan. The story of two somewhat-bumbling protagonists out to save the day from criminal ne’er-do-wells isn’t exactly brand new, but it’s a respected formula that gets carried out with gusto. The blending of humor and seriousness is extremely well-done, also.