The Instigators

The perfectly serviceable mid-budget movie is an increasingly rare beast, too often quietly shuffled off to streaming, gathering virtual dust. Doug Liman’s The Instigators — which has had a limited theatrical release here before finding a permanent home on Apple TV+ — is a perfect example of the kind of film you used to see in cinemas all the time, its appeal simply found in its big personalities colliding. Though the film is carried by Matt Damon as a man out of his depth and Casey Affleck as a wiseass career criminal, it is a veritable parade of guys: a delightful mix of character actors simply doing their thing. Michael Stuhlbarg is all simmering frustration and impatience. Ron Perlman is intimidating. Ving Rhames is cool and wears a hat.

As for Damon and Affleck, they play Rory and Cobby, two Bostonians who plan a heist of
a post-election party, targeting the undeclared cash donations. In grand heist-movie tradition it immediately goes pear-shaped, and the two desperately improvise to stay out of jail and make it out of town. Part of that plan includes kidnapping Rory’s therapist Donna (Hong Chau) — with her permission, of course. As Donna, Chau is calmer and more measured than in her usual roles, but she is still funny when that demeanour sometimes cracks in the midst of Rory and Cobby’s harebrained schemes. As Rory, Damon plays a guy not used to the criminal life, while Affleck’s Cobby is much more comfortable and fast-talking. The friction between them makes every scene move at a brisk clip.

It’s a crisply staged, breezily enjoyable flick.

Director Doug Liman doesn’t always hit the right tone — perhaps it makes too little of its emotional stakes — but the script, from Affleck and Chuck MacLean, builds a very funny and smart (or, as they would say in Massachusetts, “smaht”) heist film in the vein of No Sudden Move, Ambulance and Widows, seemingly about how everyone in Boston is always bickering. Almost every conversation in the entire film turns into an argument, petty differences turning into chaotic cross-talking.

Indeed, this is a very talky, mile-a-minute dialogue kind of film. The action is not overly heavy, arriving instead in compelling bursts. One standout is a mid-movie car chase which almost plays like a comic inversion of the one in Liman and Damon’s last collaboration, The Bourne Identity. There are some moments where the VFX touch-ups stick out like a sore thumb, but it’s not too intrusive; the main reason to stick around is its characters, butting heads. In capturing that, Liman’s digital photography seems to take inspiration from Soderbergh’s more recent output, with its vérité look and appropriately freewheeling movement. It’s a crisply staged, breezily enjoyable flick — one hopefully not doomed to be scrolled past on a streaming service.