Film Review: The Instigators

The Instigators
Director: Doug Liman
Artists Equity
Streaming on AppleTV+ 08.09

“This has too much plot and not enough story.” – Samuel Goldwyn

This infamous quote from one of Hollywood’s most well-known walking gaffe machines seems pretty funny on the surface, yet I’ve seen several movies over the years that fit this description pretty nicely. The Instigators has a setup, plot devices, twists and colorful characters who intersect, and these combined elements get the film from point A to point B, but never entirely convinced me that it had a story to tell. 

Rory (Matt Damon, Good Will Hunting, The Martian) is an ex-Marine in Boston drowning in debt after a divorce, needing $32,400.80 to get things in order. He’s recruited by a small-time crime boss, Besegai (Michael Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man, Call Me By Your Name) for a heist at Mayor Miccelli’s (Ron Perlman, Hellboy) victory celebration, where donations are cash only. Rory teams up with ex-con Cobby (Casey Affleck, Gone Baby Gone, Manchester By The Sea) and thug Scalvo (recording artist Jack Harlow). When the plan goes awry, Rory and Cobby flee, with Cobby wounded. Rory seeks help from his therapist, Dr. Donna Rivera (Hong Chau, Downsizing, The Whale), who has an MD and is qualified to remove the bullet.  She agrees to aid them on the condition that she is their hostage and Rory turns himself in later. Pursued by police, crime lords, and bureaucrats, the trio bonds while navigating this high-stakes game of survival.

The screenplay by Chuck McLean (City on a Hill) and Casey Affleck seems to use the fact that it has an Affleck, a Damon, Boston and crime as all it really needs to sell itself. And it is enough to make for a watchable, if rather unfocused and meandering film, thanks to the cast and to the direction of skilled veteran director Doug Liman, who is reteaming with Damon for the first time since The Bourne Identity in 2002. The film’s one major chase scene, which is amusingly set to the diegetic music of Petula Clark’s classic 1964 recording of Downtown playing on the car radio, is gleefully memorable, and whenever the script allows Liman to take advantage of his gift for brisk pacing, The Instigators is easily digestible if not very filling. It also plays well enough when it’s focused on the interplay between Rory and Cobby, and even more so when Donna is thrown into the mix.  Nevertheless, the setup is sloppy with some big questions unanswered—the biggest one being how exactly Rory got pulled into this in the first place when he seemingly has no criminal contacts, or how he’s affording regular sessions with such a qualified therapist when he’s so broke. The heist itself is convoluted and hard to become invested in, and so many incidental characters have been jammed in to accommodate a who’s who of character actors in the ensemble cast, that too often I felt rather unclear as to exactly who was who, and rather ambivalent about whether I cared enough to keep it straight.

Damon may be the best leading man of the 21st Century, and it’s hard to go wrong when he’s on screen. However, while Rory is a sympathetic character who is easy enough to feel for, I never felt like I got to know him well enough to know if he was someone I could connect to in real life, whereas I easily got to know Cobby well enough to know I definitely would not. The odd couple chemistry between the emotionally detached Rory and the abrasive comedy is strong, and Affleck is such a wonderfully natural presence that Cobby’s more obnoxious qualities make them gel as a strong comic duo. Whether we care enough about what happens to them once the movie is over to actively root for them to come out on top is another matter. Chau is outstanding as by far the most endearing character, while Stuhlbarg is stuck growling and shouting so much labored Boston tough-guy dialogue that he’s just annoying, and Perlman is even worse. Harlow seems to have shown up on set only to realize that he can’t act and nervously fumbles his way through it, and while Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction, Mission: Impossible) is welcome as an enforcer named Frank Toomey, he’s squeezed in pretty tight among all the other supporting players, including Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2), Toby Jones (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) and Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell, Cruella), and none of them get much chance to actively contribute.

The Instigators is far from a bad movie, it’s simply so undercooked that it’s hard to walk away convinced that it was far enough along to determine whether it even deserved to be made, let alone whether this was an adequate final draft of the script. The overwhelming feeling here is that Mclean had an idea, Affleck wanted to make a movie and Damon had the clout to make it happen, not that this was a project that anyone saw as being truly deserving of getting made on its own merits. If you already have AppleTV+, it’s less than two hours of content that you’re unlikely to view a second time. –Patrick Gibbs

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