Another Day in "Paradise"

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

Dan Fogelman's new series for Hulu is combining several different kinds of stories.  The President of the United States, Cal Bradford (James Marsden), is mysteriously killed in the premiere, and the head of his Secret Service, Agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) has to figure out who did it.  Suspects include the president's lover Nicole Robinson (Krys Marshall), a billionaire advisor, Samantha "Sinatra" Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), secret service agents Pace (Jon Beavers) and Driscoll (Nicole Brydon Bloom), and briefly Collins himself.  So that's a murder mystery and a White House drama to start with.  

Of course, this is Dan Fogelman reuniting with Sterling K. Brown, whose last collaboration was the beloved weepie "This is Us."  So, as you might expect, we also get plenty of family drama here.  Collins is parenting teenage daughter Presley (Aliyah Maston) and son James (Percy Daggs IV) in the absence of his wife Teri (Euka Okuma).  President Bradford is estranged from his wife Jessica (Cassidy Freeman), has a disapproving father, Kane (Gerald McRaney), and a teenage son, Jeremy (Charlie Evans), he struggles to connect to.  We learn that characters like Sinatra and Pace are driven by awful traumas in their pasts.  "Paradise" is structured similarly to "Lost," with much of the story told through flashbacks.  President Bradford may die in the first episode, but James Marsden does excellent work throughout the series, including the finale.

Final warning for spoilers here.  "Paradise" is also a dystopian story, about a community that escaped a global cataclysm by relocating to an elaborate bunker city.  Building this city required great economic, political, and personal cost, including a lot of secrets and lies to keep the peace.  So on top of everything else, "Paradise" is also a science-fiction allegory and conspiracy thriller.  We're often operating in the same thematic space as shows like "Fallout" or "Silo" - and the concepts require no less suspension of disbelief - but with much more grounded characters.  A major theme is the heavy mental and emotional toll of doing unthinkable things to ensure the survival of a chosen few.  It's very clever how the show has been structured to get viewers who might not be receptive to this kind of genre show to take a chance on "Paradise" through the murder mystery hook.       

Dan Fogelman's work has long been one of my blind spots, since most of his shows aired on network television after I stopped paying attention to network television.  What I noticed immediately about "Paradise" was the level of the acting talent involved - Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, James Marsden, and more are given the space to deliver complex, thoughtful performances.  There is some very potent melodrama here, and the focus of the show is always on the personalities and relationships rather than spectacle.  The reason why "Paradise" is able to be all these different things simultaneously is because in the end it's a character drama.  Episodes spotlight one character at a time, going through their histories and showing us what makes them tick.  So when we get to the big effects-heavy, action-heavy showstopper late in the season, it makes it that much more impactful.  Also, if you're frustrated about dystopian shows always skipping over the big cataclysmic disaster, "Paradise" does an excellent job with its apocalypse.

If you're not a fan of melodrama, "Paradise" may not be for you.  The show does have a tendency to rely on familiar tropes and some silly action movie logic, which the terrific cast can't always compensate for.  The needle drops are also  incredibly corny, even though it's set up that President Bradford likes terrible '80s pop music.  Yes, we get a sad version of a certain Phil Collins song as a major musical motif, and it's simultaneously awful and great.  However, I have the highest respect for the creators for leaning into that impulse and committing to every creative decision.  "Paradise" never feels like it's flailing, delivering satisfying emotional endpoints for nearly every storyline by the end of the season.  We do find out who killed President Bradford in the last episode.  So if a second season doesn't happen, I can still happily recommend this as an eight-part miniseries.  And unlike a lot of eight-part narratives we've seen recently, this one ends exactly where it should.         

 

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The 2024-2025 Television I Didn't Watch

In advance of my 2024-2025 television top ten list (I use the Emmy eligibility calendar), I want to talk about some of the shows I didn't watch this year, for various reasons.  There are far, far more shows being produced there than anyone can possibly keep up with, so this is not an exhaustive list.  The titles discussed below are only the most high profile ones that I want to talk about why I skipped.  I reserve the right to revisit these choices in the future, though I still haven't seen anything from last year's list.

English Teacher - Despite lots of good press, I'm sorry to say that it came down to me just not finding the clips of the show I saw very funny or engaging.  Brian Jordan Alvarez created and stars in a Hulu comedy where he plays a gay high school English teacher trying to survive workplace tensions, culture clashes, and the generation gap.  I have heard nice things about the main character being very fallible and imperfect and having to examine his own privilege regularly.  It's just not for me. 

Your Friends & Neighbors - The new Jon Hamm Apple TV+ series initially piqued my interest when I heard it being compared to one of my favorite obscure 1960s movies, "The Swimmer."  It's about a recent divorcee trying to keep up appearances, who turns to crime, starts breaking into his neighbors' houses, and uncovers a lot of secrets.  I'm thrilled that Hamm has a regular TV gig again, but this looks much more focused on the criminal aspect than I hoped.  Killer title sequence though. 

Dying For Sex - I tend to enjoy Michelle Williams in just about anything, but an FX miniseries about a terminally ill woman who decides to end her marriage so she can go on a journey of sexual discovery?  Why does so much media about older women involve this particular life choice lately?  Is this a common fantasy?  It's not often that I feel that I'm too young or not at the right state of life for a show, but maybe this is one of those times.  I'll circle back around in a few years to see if anything has changed. 

MobLand - This is the one that I'm the most likely to give in and watch at some point, because I keep paying for Paramount+ every year for the "Star Trek" shows, and there's just not much else on the service.  A Guy Ritchie series about Pierce Brosnan heading a crime family that includes Tom Hardy and Helen Mirren sounds great.  I liked Ritche's last series,"The Gentlemen."  Alas, this one just looks drab and humorless.  And it's a prequel to "Ray Donovan"?  Do I need to watch that first?  

Mid-Century Modern - It's "Golden Girls" with the gays, including Nathan Lane and Matt Bomer, plus Linda Lavin in her last role playing Lane's mother is right up my alley.  And the guest star list for the first season is fabulous.  However, I have the same problem with this show that I do with a lot of other traditional sitcoms, which is that I keep forgetting they exist.  They simply aren't major priorities for me, so I don't carve out time for them.  Maybe I'll get to this one after I finish "Brooklyn 99."

Rivals - Why is this British series about angry business people on Disney+?  It stars David Tennant and Alex Hassell as media figures who hate each other, so I'm immediately curious, but it also smacks of someone trying to make their own "Succession," which makes me want to keep my distance.  I don't find shows about terrible people trying to destroy each other entertaining, which is why I never watched "Succession" in the first place.  Excellent reviews though, so kudos to everyone involved.   

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story - I was tempted, but I stayed away from the Ryan Murphy produced "Dahmer" series," and I ultimately stayed away from the Menendez brothers series for similar reasons.  There's way too much salacious content being added to these shows that appears to have no basis in reality.  Artists do what artists do, but the media treatment of the Menendez case was exploitative from the start, and everything about this just feels in bad taste. 

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"Drop" and "Death of a Unicorn"

I couldn't stop thinking about the new Blumhouse thriller "Drop," but not for the reasons you might think.  Meghann Fahy stars as Violet, a single mom and domestic abuse survivor who goes out on a first date with photographer Henry (Brendan Sklenar), who she's been messaging on a dating app.  Their date keeps being interrupted by alerts on Violet's phone from a stranger - who is suddenly in Violet's house and threatening to harm her young son (Jacob Robinson) unless Violet does exactly what he says.

There is something about Meghann Fahy and Brendan Sklenar onscreen together that pings as very female-media-coded in a way that most movies in this genre don't.  Specifically, "Drop" often displayed the aesthetics of an older breed of Lifetime made-for-TV movie.  Fahy's not an actress I'm familiar with, but it didn't surprise me that she got her start in soaps, or that Sklenar recently appeared as the blandly hunky ex in last year's Blake Lively melodrama, "It Ends With Us."  The target audience for "Drop" seems to be midwestern white moms.  I specify white, because I have never seen a whiter post-1980s film set in Chicago.  Seriously, the only minorities are the African-American bartender, a barely glimpsed onscreen therapy patient, and the gayest gay waiter I've seen in years.  Was this on purpose?  Was director Christopher Landon aware of what he was doing?  The possibilities haunt me.

The fact that I was thinking about these sorts of details and not about the likelihood of this kind of situation ever happening to me tells you what I think about how effective "Drop" is as a thriller.  Sadly, the title only incidentally refers to anybody plummeting from great heights.  Instead, poor Violet is being harassed by a series of iPhone AirDrops that her blackmailer uses to communicate with her.  "Drop" is a great looking movie that does a lot of fun things with the various text messages from the blackmailer, and features a beautiful restaurant in a skyscraper, Palate, as its primary location.  However, the characters are paper thin, a lot of the plotting makes no sense, and the action beats are so tropey and silly that it completely took me out of the film.  If the tone were campier, the dialogue zippier, and the romance less Instagrammable, this might have worked better.   Well - I'm being meaner than I should. Fahy does a perfectly fine job, and original films are rare enough as it is.  However, it's really hard to call "Drop" original, because it's so generic and borderline campy in all the wrong ways.   

On to "Death of a Unicorn," a film with better actors and worse special effects.  I wasn't expecting much out of this movie, since it came and went from theaters very quickly, and there was no real discussion of it among the movie nerds whatsoever.  Like "Drop," this movie also feels like a genre flick making a play for female audiences, though in this case it's a creature feature instead of a thriller.  Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega star as lawyer Elliot Kintner and his college-aged daughter Ridley.  They're headed for the remote home of the Leopolds - father Odell (Richard E. Grant), mother Belinda (Téa Leoni), and son Shepard (Will Poulter) -  who head a pharma company, so Elliot can close a deal to do more lucrative work for them.  And en route, Eliot hits a unicorn with the rental car.

After watching the trailer, I was expecting "Death of a Unicorn" to be very satirical, like "The Menu," or any of the other recent films about rich people being terrible.  While "Death of a Unicorn" does belong in that category, the movie I kept finding myself making comparisons to was "Cocaine Bear."  A significant chunk of this movie is a very broad horror-comedy where the characters are getting killed off left and right by big monsters, often in absurd and gruesome ways.  The buildup to the carnage does have plenty to say about respecting nature and the privileged being terrible, but the writing is on the weak side, and it takes forever for things to escalate.  Still you can't put Grant, Leoni, Poulter, and Anthony Carrigan (as a put-upon butler) in a movie together and not walk away with a few genuine laughs.  Unfortunately, this leaves Selena Gomez to play it straight as our lead, and Paul Rudd is in the absolutely thankless role of '90s dad who cares about his job and financial security.  They're good enough actors to pull through, but it's by the skin of their teeth.

First time writer/director Alex Scharfman has some great ideas, and I appreciate that he really goes for it with the CGI fantasy creatures in this film, despite clearly only having a limited budget.  The most impressive thing about "Death of a Unicorn" may be its $15 million price tag.  I feel the film got its act together by the finale well enough that I'd recommend it as a fun piece of silly horror comedy, especially for younger viewers.  It's got glaring flaws, but it's good enough that I hope Scharfman gets more chances in the future to improve on this. 

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"Say Nothing" on The Troubles

There was very little fanfare last year around the release of "Say Nothing," an FX miniseries based on Patrick Radden Keefe's book about the lives of Irish Republican Army (IRA) members during The Troubles.  This is a piece of history that I know very little about, and I think having almost no preconceived notions about the politics of the conflicts helped me take the show at face value.  "Say Nothing" is a complex, wonderfully human drama, and among the best things I watched in 2024.

The central characters are the Price sisters, who we follow in two different time periods.  Dolours (Lola Petticrew in the '70s, Maxine Peake in the present) is the more daring one, and Marian (Hazel Doupe in the '70s, Helen Behan in the present) is loyal to a fault.  They grow up as persecuted Catholics in Northern Ireland, become radicalized in their teens, and eventually join up with the IRA in the hopes of reunifying Ireland.  Initially the girls are involved in bank robberies for funds, but then become part of bombing campaigns and hunger strikes in the 1970s.  In parallel, we learn about other IRA members like Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and Gerry Adams (Josh Finan).  Adams becomes a prominent Irish politician who is still alive at the time of writing, so every episode where he's depicted ends with a pointed disclaimer about him denying ever being part of the IRA.

"Say Nothing" is largely sympathetic to the Price sisters, showing their tumultuous backgrounds and family history of fierce resistance to British rule.  However, crucially, it is not sympathetic to other members of the IRA or the aims of the organization as a whole.  The first episode shows us the upsetting abduction of a woman named Jean McConville (Judith Roddy) from her home, in front of her children.  Eventually we learn that Jean is one of the Disappeared, a victim of IRA groups who secretly abducted and murdered civilians they believed to be spies.  Jean's disappearance becomes a big part of the show's final episodes, where Dolours struggles with whether to share the information she has.  Her story is revealed to be one of embitterment and disillusionment, and much of the series is framed by interviews with IRA members trying to deal with and atone for their past actions.  

The show's creators clearly play fast and loose with the truth, and they invent or greatly embellish some events, but the effectiveness of "Say Nothing" comes from the way these events are framed as the regrets of their aging, haunted participants.  There are so many secrets being kept by all the characters that even if what is being depicted isn't true, the actual truth seems likely to be even worse.  Every episode is packed with incidence, covering months or even years.  One episode is devoted to the sisters' time in prison and their agonizing hunger strike, which drags out over six months.  Another shows the entirety of the relationship that the girls have with another IRA member, the troubled Joe Lynskey (Adam Best).  It never feels like a second is being wasted.

I recognized a couple of faces in the cast, like Maxine Peake, Roy Kinnear as a British police official, and Laura Donnelly playing one of Jean's daughters as an adult, but I like that I was totally unfamiliar with most of the actors, which helped the degree of immersion considerably.  Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe are fantastic through and through as the Price sisters.  It's so easy to become invested in their reckless career as revolutionaries, especially when their early capers involve things like dressing up as nuns to stick up a bank.  The deeper and deeper they get into the morally troubling territory, with ever more terrible consequences, the more compelling the performances get.  Eventually the POV shifts from the younger versions of the Price sisters to the older ones, but both versions are important in the narrative the whole way through.    

 

The material gets pretty dark here, so I'll warn that this clearly isn't a show for everyone.  If it sounds like something you would enjoy, however, "Say Nothing" has my strongest recommendations.  

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"Freaky Tales" Pays Homage

I love how many movies there have been set in and around Oakland, California over the past few years.  Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck  have chosen to cash in their "Captain Marvel" blank check to make an anthology film of strange, freaky little urban legends set in Oakland, in 1987.  Though it takes some influences from movies like "Creepshow," "Heavy Metal," and "Scanners," "Freaky Tales: isn't properly a horror or science-fiction movie.  Instead, it takes place in a very hyperstylized comic-book universe, where reality can get warped.  Characters keep spotting a mysterious green light that appears when something is about to get wild - from a wronged man using psychic powers to punish some scumbag murderers, to a pair of newbie female rappers about to throw down against a pro.

Each story is from a different genre and spotlights different subcultures, but all four take place adjacent to each other, roughly at the same time.  In the first, a group of punks defend the Gilman, a beloved East Bay music club, against attacks by neo-Nazis.  The leads are youngsters Travis (Angus Cloud), and Tina (Ji-Young Yoo), whose romance blossoms as the hostilities heat up.  Next, comes the showdown between the rap duo Danger Zone, featuring best friends Barbie (Dominique Thorne) and Entice (Normani), and West Coast hip-hip legend Too $hort (DeMario Symba Driver).  Third is the tale of a debt collector named Clint (Pedro Pascal), who intends to quit the sordid business until his wife Grace (Natalia Dominguez) becomes a victim of a revenge plot gone wrong.  Finally, beloved Golden State Warriors basketball player Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) is obliged to take matters into his own hands when he's targeted in a robbery orchestrated by a crooked cop (Ben Mendelsohn).  This involves an extended action sequence with a katana and throwing stars.        

I love how "Freaky Tales" looks, with its comics-inspired framing devices, stylized characters and some old fashioned special effects.  Even the titles have been tweaked to add VHS artefacts.  The basketball game in the last story is done with traditional animation clips and the action showdowns are wildly over-the-top, Grindhouse-style clashes that are a whole lot of fun to watch.   It's a little surprising to spot actors like Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn in this movie - not to mention the old guy playing the sage video store clerk - but they're all clearly enjoying themselves.  Mendelsohn is so good at playing a real mustache-twirling villain who we all know is going to get it in the end.  And that end is suitably epic in a very '80s way.  Jay Ellis as Sleepy Floyd, however, is the one most likely to show up on T-shirts in the future.  In short, for a fan of 80s B-movies, there are a lot of nostalgic joys to be had.  I don't know what a mainstream audience is going to think, but this movie has all the earmarks of a future cult favorite.       

"Freaky Tales" was shot on location in the East Bay for the most part, and uses real people and events for additional authenticity.  The real Sleepy Floyd and Too $hort make cameo appearances, along with several Bay Area landmarks.  At the same time, there are some touches that highlight that this is an idealized fantasy of the past, a vision of the way things might have been if attitudes had been a little different.  The four segments are of varying quality, and there are some significant ups and downs and rough spots with the plotting.    The debt collector story in particular feels fragmentary and not thought through enough.  Still, the spirit of the enterprise won me over, and there are so many little moments that made me downright gleeful.  This is so clearly a love letter to this place and time and community - and no surprise that Oakland is Ryan Fleck's hometown.  

This is an 80s throwback, but at the same time "Freaky Tales" feels like an original - or at least the kind of film that doesn't come around too often anymore.

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I Heart "Ironheart"

"Ironheart" was hastily dumped on Disney+ a few weeks ago, premiering its six episodes over just two weeks.  And it in no way deserved this treatment.  Created by Chinaka Hodge, the series is about Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the young genius who built her own Iron Man-style armor.  She was introduced in "Wakanda Forever" a few years ago as an American university student.  However, in the opening scene of "Ironheart," Riri is expelled from MIT after one lab mishap too many, and goes home to Chicago to stay with her mother Ronnie (Anji White).  

Riri has sky-high ambitions, but coming from a working class background, she'll need to find her own way forward.  In order to make some easy cash, she ends up falling in with Parker Robbins, a charming villain known as the Hood (Anthony Ramos), and his gang of talented criminals.  She also makes the acquaintance of an oddball black market arms dealer, Joe (Alden Ehrenreich), and attracts the attention of other sinister forces.  It emerges that Riri is still grieving the deaths of her beloved stepfather Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins) and her best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross), who were killed in a drive-by shooting.  Eric André, Shea Couleé, and Sacha Baron Cohen show up in roles that I will not spoil, except to say that this may be the best use of Sacha Baron Cohen in years.       

"Ironheart" is chaotic and juggling too many ideas, but it's also a refreshingly different entry for the MCU.  Riri Williams is a genius like Tony Stark, but she's also prone to making terrible choices like Tony Stark, and suffers for those choices.  Every time she does something brilliant, she tends to do something equally dunderheaded, like trusting the wrong person or taking the easy way out.  Riri could be a hero, but by the end of "Ironheart" she seems just as likely to become a villain, and it's her own fault.  I really enjoy Dominique Thorne in the role, who keeps Riri a compelling and sympathetic presence throughout.  The creators crucially give her a family life and a history that feel very genuine, and there's an attention to the way she talks and dresses and interacts with others that grounds her in an emphatically African-American milieu before all the genre elements start coming into play.     

The supporting cast boasts a deep bench of acting talent.  Lyric Ross as Natalie stands out for her bright personality and skill at banter.  I also like Anji White as supportive Ronnie and Alden Ehrenreich as the schlubby paranoiac Joe.  However, I'm not sold on Anthony Ramos as The Hood.  He's  very generic and the various pieces of his origin don't quite fit together.  I suspect that there were multiple versions of The Hood that ended up all being combined in the end, with poor results.  Or it might just be my indifference to Ramos, who I've seen in enough major projects to know that he doesn't work for me in roles like this.  Fortunately, he's not the only villain in the show; the others are significantly more effective.

There were clearly a lot of ambitions behind "Ironheart," going by the caliber of the talent involved and the expensive looking production.  With such a large cast and so many connections to different parts of the MCU, it feels like a miracle that the show actually coheres as well as it does.  It takes a few episodes for the show's different priorities to all get sorted out, but once they do "Ironheart" is actually one of the better MCU shows.  I think it helps that while Riri Williams is definitely living in the MCU, she's not on the familiar hero path, at least not yet.  Her story is playing more like "Agatha" or "Loki" than "Miss Marvel" right now, and that's exciting.

Unfortunately, it looks like the support for "Ironheart" at Marvel has disappeared, probably due to the current political climate.  It's an awful shame, because Riri Williams has a lot of potential, and her show gets a lot of things right that previous MCU series like "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" didn't.  I hope that this isn't the last we see of Riri and this group of characters, but I'm grateful that they got a chance at the spotlight in any case.

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"Novocaine" and "Neighborhood Watch"

We've seen a lot of Jack Quaid in the first third of 2025, with "Companion," "Novocaine," and "Neighborhood Watch" all being released within a few weeks of each other - the last premiering on VOD.  Notably, all of these titles are original IP, while most of Quaid's notable work up to this point has been in franchises - "The Boys," "Scream,"  "Star Trek: Lower Decks," and the recent animated "Superman" series.  I take it as a good sign that he's taking some risks, and that the studios are starting to look at him as a leading man.  We really need more leading men in his age range that aren't immediately synonymous with superheroes, so I'm rooting for him.  I like Quaid as an everyman type, especially since he's got a decent amount of range, can do comedy, and has played villains a few times.  So, with that in mind, let's look at his two most recent films where he has a starring role, "Novocaine" and "Neighborhood Watch."   

"Novocaine," from directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, is a self-aware action comedy that has a unique take on the unstoppable one-man-army character.  Quaid plays Nathan Cain, a man with a condition that causes him not to feel pain.  This means he lives a solitary, carefully controlled lifestyle where he subsists on a liquid diet and sets timers to go to the bathroom, for fear that he'll accidentally harm himself if he takes even minor risks.  However, after a date with a coworker, Sherry (Amber Midthunder), he gains the confidence to start breaking out his shell.  And when Sherry is taken hostage by bank robbers, led by a sadistic criminal (Ray Nicholson), Nathan decides to use his inability to feel pain to thwart the baddies and rescue her himself.  Betty Gabriel, Matt Walsh, and Jacob Batalon also get involved in various supporting roles I won't spoil.

 

I really like the first half of "Novocaine," where we actually spend enough time with Nathan and Sherry to get to know them and to get invested in their relationship, which not enough films do.  The actors' chemistry is good enough that I would have been happy if "Novocaine" had just been a romantic-comedy without any of the chases and fisticuffs.  However, the action sequences are good - very inventive and absurd.  It's incredibly cringey to watch some of the fights, where Nathan is doing horribly damaging things to his body, but persists because he can't feel a thing.  I would not recommend this film to those who are sensitive to blood and gore, even if a lot of it is played for laughs.  The filmmakers do a pretty decent job of putting together absolutely ridiculous scenarios, like one of the robbers booby trapping his house with elaborate weaponry, while also snarking on the usual tropes of mindless action films.  We get something closer to real-world consequences for the carnage than usual, at the end of the film, which I appreciate.

As for Jack Quaid as an action hero, he does a good job.  A lot of the comedy is based on his panicky reactions to being in common action movie situations, or sight gags involving his total nonchalance at being grievously injured.  He's definitely better at the comedy than the action, which distinguishes him from most of the male leads who have been showing up in this genre lately.  Now, what I haven't seen Jack Quaid in too often are straight dramatic roles, so I was especially curious about his appearance in "Neighborhood Watch," where he plays a paranoid schizophrenic named Simon, trying to save a kidnapped girl.  He shares top billing with Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Ed Deerman, a retired security guard who lives next door to Simon and his sister Dee Dee (Malin Akerman).  Simon insists he saw a girl being forced into a van, but he suffers from visual and auditory hallucinations, and nobody believes him.  However, after multiple attempts he's able to convince Ed to help him.        

I'm worried that "Neighborhood Watch" is going to be overlooked, because it's a smaller indie film that hasn't gotten much buzz and only middling reviews.  However, I found it very enjoyable.  Directed by Duncan Skiles and written by Sean Farley, it's a very grounded, occasionally very sobering story of a pair of mismatched losers who struggle in their daily lives and unexpectedly bond over this fool's errand.  We're operating in the realm of neo-noir, with the action set in and around a college town in Alabama.  Simon can't find work because of his history in institutions and his constant battles with his symptoms.  Aging Ed can't let go of his old role as a security professional - the closest he ever got to being a real cop -  and the kidnapping gives him an excuse to use some of his acquired investigative skills.  And intiially, Nathan and Ed are both terrible at being detectives.  They don't fool anybody, get called out immediately by almost everyone they meet, get beaten up, threatened, and are warned off multiple times by the actual police.    

From the trailers, I originally expected "Neighborhood Watch" to be more comedic, similar to something like "The Kid Detective."  While "Neighborhood Watch" does have some wryly funny moments in it, I was happy to discover how much of the film is played straight.  Simon's delusions in particular are always deeply unnerving, and his meltdowns and outburst are never treated as laughing matters.  This is the first underdog story I've watched in a while where the leads actually feel properly downtrodden and out of their depths.  Morgan and Quaid both turn in strong performances - Quaid gets the showier part, but Morgan comes off better, and they pair together well.  And a few overly convenient little plot beats aside, I liked the way that "Neighborhood Watch" came together in the end.      

As idiosyncratic little indie movies go, this one is a keeper.

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