The Instigators is now streaming on Apple TV+ and playing in select theaters.
The Instigators is the first time you could reasonably describe a film as a Damon/Affleck vehicle and then have to clarify which Affleck. Everyone knows the heartwarming story of Matt and Ben, besties from Boston who went on to co-star in movies, co-host a competition show about movies, and co-write an Oscar-winning screenplay. What’s always received less attention is Damon’s on- and offscreen relationship with the other Affleck brother, Casey. That might partially be a matter of the harassment allegations that have hung around the younger sibling’s neck for a few years. (Who wants to root for a bromance when one half of it is problematic?) But it could also be that the movies Matt and Casey have made together until now – the Ocean’s trilogy, a couple of Christopher Nolan blockbusters – don’t center their dynamic. The one previous time they co-headlined a film, it consisted of two dudes named Gerry wandering aimlessly through the desert, never saying much of anything to each other.
Casey Affleck co-wrote The Instigators, which maybe helps explain why it’s the first proper showcase for his own lifelong friendship with Damon. Like Good Will Hunting, which featured both Afflecks, it’s even set in Boston, allowing its stars to slip back into their native accents and get in touch with their respective roots as knucklehead, working-class Massholes. The charm of this breezy crime caper rests almost entirely on the untapped chemistry between the two – a buddy-comedy rapport that’s pricklier and arguably funnier than The Matt and Ben Show.
Damon is Rory, an ex-marine trying to get back on his feet after spectacularly torpedoing his life and marriage. Whereas the actor’s similarly Bostonian character from The Departed joked that psychoanalysis was wasted on a Southie punk like himself, Rory is doing his best to work through his issues with a therapist (Hong Chau). It’s a pretty stock role – the saintly movie screwup, an ordinary guy who just wants to see his son again – but Damon makes him sympathetic and likable enough in his hangdog regret.
Rory needs a very specific amount of money to pay off a mountain of child-support debt, and that noble goal naturally leads him astray into ignoble business. He ends up the third leg of a smash-and-grab robbery scheme – a plan to rip off the victory party of the incumbent mayor (Ron Perlman) on election night. His accomplices: Affleck’s ex-convict Cobby, who’s introduced amusingly roping a neighborhood kid into helping him cheat a breathalyzer, and the supposed brains of the operation, an equally mistake-prone crook played – via a repetitive volley of f-bombs – by the rapper Jack Harlow.
The Instigators has the set-up of a down-and-dirty crime thriller, complete with a montage that takes us through the planning stages and a One Last Job destined to go awry. And awry it certainly does go; for starters, the wrong guy wins the election! But just as we’re prepared to watch the walls close in around these hapless criminals, the movie pivots in a different direction. The director, Doug Liman, has inverted the structure of his recent COVID comedy Locked Down, which became a heist movie only in its final stretch. Here, the botched robbery is the catalyst for something a little more laidback: an on-the-lam comedy in which our mismatched heroes – one humbled, the other a wiseass, both vintage blunderers – flee the authorities and kingpins alike.
With its playful funk score by Christophe Beck and a plot that becomes a tangle of Elmore Leonard-style mishaps, the film often operates like Soderbergh Lite. Liman assembles an ace cast of character actors to play the various strands of his small-time Boston crime empire, including Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, Toby Jones, Paul Walter Hauser, and – for the full Out of Sight effect – Ving Rhames as a cucumber-cool fixer on the Boston boys’ tail. The ensemble is so stacked with effortless talent, you barely mind how arbitrary the corruption storyline connecting everyone is. (Were this an actual Soderbergh movie, it would have a clearer point to make about the intersection of blue- and white-collar crime.) Affleck and his co-writer, Chuck Maclean, are sharper on the small, farcical details, like a long debate about how much manpower you can always expect behind the wheel of an armored truck.
Rory and Cobby, who never entirely stop bickering, end up yanking the former’s shrink into the action, not so much taking her hostage as giving her some plausible deniability to help a couple of bumbling fugitives. Continuing her streak of being believable in just about everything – be it a maudlin Oscar grab like The Whale or quirky sci-fi comedy like Downsizing – Chau sells the predicament of a mental-health professional torn between following protocol and doing what’s best for her client. Yet her calming presence and on-the-fly sitcom diagnoses (turns out both of these men could use some time on the couch!) underscores the larger problem with The Instigators. Rory and Cobby don’t seem particularly worried, even when narrowly slipping out of the crosshairs of men who want them dead, and that’s probably because they’re never actually in any danger. For all its gunplay and explosions and multi-car chases, The Instigators is too committed to its good vibes to flirt with real urgency. It’s a crime lark so relaxed it practically slips the audience a sedative.
Liman, who ushered Damon onto the action-hero A-list with The Bourne Identity a couple decades ago, finds ways to blow money. (There’s a climactic second heist involving fire trucks that probably cost as much money as the characters are trying to steal.) But on a whole, The Instigators is closer in chatty, small-scale spirit to the director’s debut, Swingers, with Damon in the Jon Favreau role and Affleck bringing some of the sardonic attitude of Vince Vaughn. Though packed with familiar faces, the movie really does come down to the clashing personalities of its stars, who bring the familiarity of childhood companionship to a couple of strangers bonding over their escalating bad luck. With apologies to Ben, this might be the Damon/Affleck pairing worth revisiting.
Though they’ve appeared in multiple movies together over the years, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck have only just now arranged a showcase for their own lifelong personal/creative rapport. The Instigators casts the two as contrasting screwups who go on the run after a heist gone wrong, with a bunch of cops and criminals played by famous character actors in hot pursuit. Director Doug Liman brings a certain discount Steven Soderbergh energy to the action, but the perennially laidback quality begins to seem like more of a liability than a merit. This buddy comedy lives or dies on your affection for its stars, offering complementary shades of good-natured Bostonian ineptitude.
