In The Instigators, Rory (Matt Damon) and Cobby (Casey Affleck) play a pair of down on their luck guys who are recruited to take part in a heist. But this isn’t just a bank or jewelry store robbery. The plan is to rob the mayor of Boston on the night of his reelection, right as he is receiving lots of secretive cast graft and bribery payments. Needless to say, the robbery goes wrong almost immediately, and it ends with one other member of the crew and the equally corrupt police commissioner dead. Now, with no money to show from the attempt and the police, the mob boss who planned the theft and the mayor’s private enforcer all in pursuit, Rory and Cobby have to try and get out of Boston alive.
The Instigators premiers on Apple TV+ today.
It is hard to give a categorization to The Instigators. It contains elements of a couple of different genres – dark comedy, buddy comedy and heist film, to be precise. Those three ingredients, as well as the talent both in front and behind the camera alongside a dash of Point Blank (1967) and Quick Change (1990), suggest a sumptuous cinematic stew (Or should that be chowder?) in the offering. Instead, though, what we get is more of a watered-down soup, only flavorful at times when one of the ingredients is allowed to bubble up to the surface.
The story takes place in Boston, a town that both Affleck and Damon have deep affection for, so one would think that the city would feel like a bigger part of the film itself. But outside of a couple of recognizable exterior locations and everyone rocking the hardest New England accent they can, the city doesn’t like a a real setting for the movie in the way that it does in films like 2003’s Mystic River or 2015’s Spotlight.
The cast all do as good work as can be expected. Affleck and Damon have a breezy chemistry that probably stems from them knowing each other for over three decades now. And the fact that the two worked alongside each other in director Steven Soderburgh’s three Ocean’s Eleven films probably brings a bit of good will towards what Affleck and Damon are doing here. But the film doesn’t just rely on such per-existing conceptions. The screenplay has Damon’s Rory talk a lot about him wanting to earn enough money in order to be able to see his son again, and Damon does act that heartbreak well. Unfortunately though, outside of those more expository moments, the movie doesn’t really show us anything about that relationship. Ultimately, that makes it feel as if the film is keeping something of a distance from the character that makes it hard for the audience to invest in his needs.
Most of the supporting cast does good work with what they are given. Michael Stuhlbarg and Alfred Molina seem to be having fun chewing scenery as the heist organizer and his second-in-command, both of whom do not seem to have inside voices. Ron Perlman’s slimy swagger as the mayor of Boston is also an exercise in pushing a performance to just at the line of being over the top. Ving Rhames’s role as the mayor’s enforcer and Toby Jones’s role as the mayor’s accountant pretty much play into similar parts that the two have played before, which allows them to add at least a little shading to what are otherwise underwritten characters.
