Review: In 'The Instigators,' a heist goes terrifically wrong
“The Instigators” may be a modern streaming movie for Apple but it’s a decidedly old-school kind of caper, stock full of local color and peopled with character-actor faces you’re happy to see
Though depression lurks around the edges of “The Instigators,” Doug Liman’s heist movie is a loosely amiable return to South Boston for Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who also co-wrote the film.
In the film’s opening moments, Rory (Damon), a former Marine, tells his therapist, Dr. Rivera (Hong Chau), that after a lifetime of screw ups and disappointments, he’s not so much forlorn as simply ready to “cash in” his ticket. His phrase is a telling one for a film where midlife disappointments and a ramshackle heist-gone-wrong plot collide in farcical ways. As a last-ditch effort and to raise $32,480 for his child support payments, Rory signs up with a criminal band of misfits to steal election-night payouts to a corrupt Boston mayor (Ron Perlman) running for reelection.
Therapists have made their ways into crime dramas like “The Sopranos,” but “The Instigators” (in theaters Thursday, on Apple TV+ Aug. 9) adds a novel wrinkle by bringing Dr. Rivera along for the ride. When Rory and Cobby (Affleck) go on the run, she tags along as a hostage by choice.
But it takes a little time for the buddy comedy to develop. First, “The Instigators” works in a large percentage of today’s top character actors — among them Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, Toby Jones and Paul Walter Hauser — all of whom raise the bar in this rudderless but winningly shaggy action comedy.
Liman, the director of “Go,” “The Bourne Identity” and the recent “Road House,” has always had a knack for freewheeling ensembles and for getting the most out of his stars’ charisma. “The Instigators” may be a modern streaming movie but it’s a decidedly old-school kind of caper, stock full of local color and peopled with faces you’re happy to see. It’s a product of Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artists Equity, which produced the film from the script by Casey Affleck and “City on the Hill” creator Chuck MacLean.
For them, the blue-collar Boston terrain of “The Instigators” is about as a cozy as bleacher seat in Fenway Park. “The Instigators” doesn’t live up to other Damon-Afflecks Beantown-set movies (“Good Will Hunting,” “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town”), and some of their Dunkin’ Donuts-adjacent schtick is at least approaching stale. You could call it a homecoming but it’s more like they never left.
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