The Instigators
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes
Stars: Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Hong Chau
Writers: Chuck MacLean, Casey Affleck
Director: Doug Liman
Streaming on Apple TV+
You know you won’t be utterly wasting your time with a movie when it stars three Oscar nominees plus a slew of beloved character actors — and it’s directed by a guy who is adept at both small-ball classics and sci-fi megamovies.
Such is the case with The Instigators, a perfectly serviceable — but frustratingly underwritten and dismissively executed — caper flick in which superstars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck rumble through the streets of Boston as a pair of good-haah-ted losers.
Like its protagonists, The Instigators crawls across the finish line powered largely by stubborn accumulated goodwill. And maybe that’s enough when you’re talking about an Apple TV+ streaming flick. It’s the kind of movie that wants to be a big-screen blockbuster when it grows up, but instead, despite a crisp run time, nearly overstays its welcome, even in your living room.
Damon stars as Rory, an ex-Marine with an ex-wife, an estranged son, and a mountain of unpaid bills. Affleck is Cobby, a hard-drinking loner of unspecified background who specializes in small-time criminality. These two are, despite their obvious congenital ineptitude, enlisted to break into a safe containing the ill-gotten gains of Boston’s crooked mayor (Hellboy’s Ron Perlman) by a pair of would-be criminal masterminds (Spider-Man villain Alfred Molina and The Shape of Water’s enigmatic Russian spy, Michael Stuhlbarg).
The elaborate, poorly planned and frankly stupid robbery scheme goes awry pretty soon, sending our boys on the run from the cops, the guys who hired them, and the mayor himself. Along the way, they pick up Rory’s psychiatrist (The Whale Oscar nominee Hong Chau), who accompanies them on the lam ostensibly because she, as Rory’s shrink, sees this as an opportunity to instill in him personal growth.
The shrink’s not-quite-thought-out decision is emblematic of the numerous fragile narrative threads being pulled here by director Doug Liman, a remarkably versatile filmmaker who helmed the intimately observed 1996 buddy comedy Swingers and the slam-bang 2014 Tom Cruise sci-fi epic Edge of Tomorrow. From beginning to end, characters in The Instigators make the kinds of choices only a writer in desperate search of a plot could dream up: The mayor keeps every penny of his ill-gotten gains not in an offshore account, but inside a refrigerator-sized safe in his City Hall office…The guys who hire the pitiful Rory and Cobby for their high-stakes heist do so only because they seem to believe these two washouts are the only available ne’er-do-wells in Greater Boston…Not once, but twice in the film, characters attempt to get out of jams by cutting gas lines and hoping the room won’t explode before they get a chance to saunter out of there…And when the boys try to make their final escape from Boston, they do so not in a stolen Jetta, but in a purloined fire truck.
Through it all, old buddies Damon and Affleck slouch along, gamely trying to infuse Rory and Cobby with good-natured antagonism, tossing lightly seasoned insults that never quite land. The script, co-written by Affleck, casts Affleck as the irreverent joker and Damon as the poker-faced utilitarian — and maybe The Instigators would have worked better had those roles been reversed.
As the psychiatrist, Chau mugs shamelessly in a desperate attempt to remind us this is a comedy. Perlman’s cartoonish mayor shouts even when he doesn’t have to. It’s always good to see character actor stalwarts like Toby Jones (as the mayor’s lawyer) and André De Shields (as a weary bar owner) on screen, but their presence only underscores the fact that their marginal characters as no less fleshed out than the stars’ are.
With talent like this at work, you know there are going to be moments when The Instigators, despite itself, is undeniably fun. Still, we can’t help but suspect people on the screen are having more fun than we are.
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