Director: Doug Liman
Writers: Casey Affleck, Chuck MacLean
Stars: Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Hong Chau
Synopsis: Rory and Cobby are unlikely partners thrown together for a heist. When it goes awry, they team up to outrun police, Boston’s crooked mayor, and a vengeful crime boss.
What do Ocean’s Eleven, The Town, Logan Lucky, Widows, and practically every other great post-2000s heist movie have in common? Two things. Firstly, most (if not all) of them master the art of the reveal; the how, when, why, and what of the given caper is cleverly crafted and executed not solely with priority placed on realism, but on the audience’s entertainment, too. Whether it’s Danny Ocean and Linus agreeing to get the “95-pound Chinese man with $160 million” out from behind the door of Terry Benedict’s vault, or Doug MacRay and James Coughlin debating whose “cah” they’re gonna take; these moments tend to make or break the build-up that has been leading to the scale finally tilting in favor of the criminals rather than the establishment.
The second thing doesn’t get nearly enough credit, yet should always be considered of equal importance: The team’s introduction. Think about the moment the key players come together in films like The Italian Job, Ambulance, 60 percent of Guy Ritchie’s filmography, or Triple Frontier. These sequences are not just seminal, they also serve as adrenaline-fueled joy rides that always prove pivotal and can stand the test of time on their own. Consider The Perfect Score: It’s no good, but it features a solid scheme and a cast that is up to the task of stealing SAT answers, by any means necessary. When they join forces, it’s impossible not to smile, even if the rest of the film falters as it attempts to bang every previously-beaten drum to death as its central heist unfolds.
That Doug Liman’s The Instigator fails to check the latter box is strike one by default, because it comes first. Within a few minutes, the film attempts to speak the partnership between Rory (Matt Damon) and Cobby (Casey Affleck) into existence despite neither having any sort of motivational pull to the operation they’ve been roped into. Rory is a depressed and in-debt divorcee whose “kill self” deadline is rapidly approaching, while Cobby is an asinine, alcoholic ex-con. The only common ground between the two is a presumed fandom for the New England Patriots, a crime against humanity in and of itself. There’s no desire for revenge, or for power, or even for glory. Just an urge to pull in some dough to pay off some debts before returning to their ho-hum lives. Rory needs $32,480 exactly; Cobby just happens to be perpetually available. It’s a conceit that might just work if it weren’t for the fact that Damon and Affleck couldn’t look less enthused to be here, a far-cry from the charisma they shared as chummy pals who aimlessly drove around Southie in search of trouble back in 1997.
Strike two: The crime itself, both in design and execution. Hired by Mr. Besegia and Richie Dechico (Michael Stuhlbarg and Alfred Molina, respectively, who appear to have worked with their dialect coaches for a combined 14 minutes in an effort to pull off a Boston accent), Rory and Cobby are given instructions to rob the city’s mayor (Ron Perlman) of millions in donations. He’s a crooked politician who has been pocketing money for years since becoming Boston’s top dog, and shows no sign of stopping. The newest batch of donations, Besegia knows for a fact, will be held in a safe at the venue for Mayor Micceli’s victory party; not only will the celebration’s guests be wealthy and generous to begin with, but a bribe is required to even get in the door. More money, less problems for everyone involved in the hit. (Foul tip: Jack Harlow intermittently manages to be funny as the third member of this thieving trio, unlike his wretched work in 2023’s White Men Can’t Jump remake.)
That is, there will be more money as long as Micceli is re-elected, something no one but first-time criminal Rory suggests as a potential outcome. The sitting mayor’s opposition, Mark Choi (Ronnie Cho), may be an underdog, but he’s a likable candidate who promises to give Boston a new direction that its citizens seem fond of. When Choi does, in fact, win the election, the stickup is compromised, and The Instigators takes a left turn into a series of car chases and cat-and-mouse minigames between the film’s two unlikely criminals and the feds, the mob-ish duo of Besegia and Dechico, and Micceli’s personal bruiser, Frank Toomey (Ving Rhames, the best part of most movies, this one included). That Rory and Cobby didn’t know each other before becoming partners should have given the film plenty of runway to shapeshift from a comedic crime saga to a male-bonding road trip movie, but both men are so frustratingly one-note that their odd-couple pairing never grows beyond Cobby trying to get Rory to crack a smile with endless crude quips, the likes of which seem to be a coping mechanism for a drunk dude who doesn’t know how to reduce the tension without being obnoxious.
Rory and Cobby, in the spirit of a road movie, do an awful lot of driving in this junker, a fitting way for Liman – the director behind this year’s lackluster Road House remake, making this his year to date a flop – to spin them around the bends of his own personal roundabout, in which every exit is a different narrative. One leads them to André de Shields’ beach house, where they face off with Paul Walter Hauser for a forgettable five minutes that mean next to nothing to the rest of the film’s events. Another almost takes them to Montreal, where they feel they could escape the cops. The route Liman dedicates the most attention to is the one where Hong Chau receives much of her completely thankless screen time as the second-best therapist Matt Damon has ever had on screen. (Note: He’s only had two).
What could’ve been a nice Downsizing reunion for Damon and Chau is – you guessed it – reduced to a flattened reenactment of the relationship between a therapist and her patient, or at least what those who worked on this movie believe is the dynamic between shrink and shrinkee. The most emotionally resonant scene between the two functions more as an ad for how to use Apple Car Play during a high-speed chase than as a moment capable of adding more depth to any of the characters. In other words, there’s a lot of “And how does that make you feel?” going on, even as Rory and Cobby drag Dr. Rivera along while inching closer to their final criminal goal, which is ultimately just an extension of their initial one, albeit not at the behest of Besegia and Dechico. Once again, this scheme fails to entertain, try as Toby Jones might in his role as Micceli’s ragdoll of a number two.
Your instinct in the aftermath of The Instigators might be to say that Damon, Affleck, and everyone else deserved a better movie than the one they got, but one cursory glance at the film’s core team should dispel any shred of sympathy. Affleck co-wrote the film; Damon co-produced it with Ben Affleck. Chau, the best performer of the top-billed three, is the only non-Ving Rhames performer that is potentially worth apologizing to, if only because it’s abundantly clear that the material she’s been given to work with here is approximately seven layers of Hell beneath that of her recent turns in projects like Driveways, The Menu, and Kinds of Kindness. It’s not an actor’s fault if the part they’re playing sounds like ChatGPT’s best attempt at writing a last-minute essay for a psychology student who forgot one was due at the end of the week.
On the whole, The Instigators is brainless enough to be worth giving a shot for 100 minutes on a slow Thursday night in. Let’s make sure that much is clear. But when there’s already so much low-quality streaming fare at an audience’s disposal these days, it’s hard to root for something as full of talent yet devoid of life as this is, a massive misfire in a genre that tends to make missing rather difficult. Even “bad” heist films somehow find ways to be entertaining, if not good. Tower Heist comes to mind; I’ll even offer up the same 60 percent of Guy Ritchie’s filmography that I did before. That The Instigators fails to reach even those meager expectations is as big of a whiff as they come. Strike three; game over.
