Damon and Affleck Sleepwalk Through the Familiar But Fun ‘The Instigators’

By Lindsay Traves | Film | August 8, 2024 |

By Lindsay Traves | Film | August 8, 2024 |

Boston crime dramas are essentially their own sub-genre. Even the New York crime king, Martin Scorsese, dabbled in the city’s gangster lore for the feature that brought him the Best Director Oscar. So natural is it to expect a Damon, an Affleck, a Pitt, or a DiCaprio in heist and crime dramas, and so instinctive is it to expect those first two names if it’s a movie set in Boston, that you could probably sleepwalk through the rest of this film’s elements like it seems the screenwriters (Casey Affleck and Chuck MacLean) did. The Instigators is certainly no The Town, but it shares just enough in common with its cohort to fill a gap and justify its existence on a streaming platform.

Affleck and Matt Damon lead as Cobby and Rory, a couple of acquaintances, pulled into a heist. Rory (embodied by Damon, who is the king of playing the “everyman”) is a former Marine mechanic who has the highest possible stakes for the “one last job” — his life. Rory promised himself about a year ago that if he could not acquire the money to pay his debts and see his son with his head held high, he would “cash in his ticket.” After revealing this to his therapist (Hong Chau, who delivers on the deadpan but is almost criminally restrained), he sets off to consider the one thing he hasn’t tried: crime.

When a couple of two-bit crooks and their money laundering scheme are desperate to put together a crew to pull off a job robbing an incumbent mayoral candidate, Rory and Cobby find themselves clunking through a job and ending up on the run from cops and crooks alike. With everyone chasing a MacGuffin that Cobby is clutching onto, the duo and the many people hunting them fall into all kinds of hijinks and close calls. Kinda like Snatch if it happened after The Town, and also the therapist is involved like in The Departed. Affleck’s influences are out there on his sleeve, it only being made more obvious that he penned it by the fact that he makes his character into the Good Will Hunting jest-y version of himself that gets all the quick jokes (that his opening joke isn’t about vanilla nut taps feels like a missed opportunity).

Skimming through the premise is difficult since The Instigators, like some of the best crime movies, has a gaggle of unreal actors in small roles. Alfred Molina, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ron Perlman … heck, I don’t even think Paul Walter Hauser was top-billed. Each doesn’t get enough to do since more time is spent trying to explain the nuanced elements of where the mayor’s cash is, but at least they get more screen time than if they were surprise guests like in Oppenheimer.

But on that premise, this film’s spin on the usual is to have the opening heist go wrong and set it around a corrupt political candidate and his safe full of money and secrets. I’m not sure that it’s as creative of a spin on the failed heist as something like Wrath of Man, but it does forge a bit of its own path by building a late-2024 film around the political corruption and gang relationships of a right-wing coded politician and the changing stakes of a robbery and its outcome when political secrets are involved but useless in the hands of knuckleheads. Maybe there’s something to having a Boston blue-collar bricklayer and a retired military man lost in the mental healthcare and financial support system working against a corrupt politician that makes this movie a smarter hint than it’ll probably get credit for.

Director Doug Liman does what he does great here. Like his recent Road House, he marks The Instigators with a big brash brazen tone that is wrapped around knowing comedy. (This might cement him as a reluctant king of streaming man-movies). It’s that and the performances of everyone in the ensemble cast that make this movie worth watching, even if it’ll be forgotten in the streaming pile by the end of the year. For all of how much fun this movie is to watch (and how many times I laughed throughout and honestly had a good time), it’s a narratively contrived mess that Affleck and Damon could have acted through in a weekend.

Men will literally rob a politician and shoot at stuff, but Rory and Cobby also go to therapy! Cobby doesn’t seem to have all of the skills of a frequent heist collaborator, but at least three times in the movie he gets the pair out of jams with brute force and by blowing things up. That seems to be this film’s perspective- if you can’t get out of a jam, literally or narratively, just use brute force and blow things up.

The Instigators hit select theaters August 2, 2024 and lands on Apple TV+ August 9, 2024