‘The Instigators’: Movie Stars Plus Boston, Divided by Gunshots and Laughs

Perhaps you’ve heard that Matt Damon is from the beautiful city of Boston. True story! So are his friends and professional colleagues the Affleck brothers — Casey and the other guy — and they seem to like to going back and filming in their hometown whenever possible. Watch these guys run around Beantown in movies like The Departed and Gone Baby Gone, and you get an inherent sense that they know these streets, they’ve tippled in those taverns, they’ve pissed in those alleyways after hours. Drop these actors in the middle of Death Valley or West Texas or Mars, and they’ll make a believer out of you. They’re pros. But cast Damon and the younger Affleck as locals from Charlestown or Quincy, and you can see them lean into the regional affects with a certain comfort and ease. The place is part of their DNA.

Co-written by Casey Affleck and City on the Hill creator Chuck MacLean, The Instigators plays its Olde Towne bona fides to the hilt, relying as much on the downtown geography and in-the-know neighborhood details as it does the names above the title. It’s one part Boston noir and one part cracked buddy comedy, as if someone read a bunch of George V. Higgins paperbacks while high on laughing gas, then decided to craft a heist thriller. You’d clock that this tale of two inept criminals had been tailored specifically for Affleck and Damon even if you didn’t know one of them helped pen the script.

And you can easily see the vibe director Doug Liman is going for, i.e. the mojo of those quirky mid-1990s movies that tried channeling 1970s crime farces and big-city-grit flicks — Safe Men, Palookaville, Bottle Rocket, even The Usual Suspects to a degree — complete with a deep bench of character actors. That it gets close to conjuring that bygone moviegoing pleasure is the best thing about this oddball throwback. No one does these kinds of films anymore. It’s scratching a much-needed niche itch. (The Instigators hits theaters on Aug. 2, then begins streaming on Apple TV+ on Aug. 7.)

First, we meet the ex-Marine: Rory (Damon), who’s in some dire financial straits and, judging from the the pointed questions his psychiatrist Dr. Rivera (Hong Chau) is asking him, has harbored some dark thoughts about self-harm. A mere $32,480 will fix everything and let him see his kid again. Desperate times means all desperate measures are on the table. Then we get introduced to the ex-con, Cobby (Affleck), who is in the middle of making some kid take a mandated breathalyzer test for him in order to unlock his motorcycle. You can already tell exactly what kind of fuck-up this guy is. He could also use some cash, given his prospects for gainful employment are nil and those Keno betting slips at his local bar are not paying off.

Lucky for them, a local gangster (Michael Stuhlbarg, hammy) needs two guys to pull a job last-minute, since his regular guys are AWOL. There’s an election happening in a few days. The corrupt-as-they-come mayor (Ron Perlman, hammier) is expected to win in a landslide per usual; his payoffs to everyone from city alderman to cops insures he’ll serve yet another term. Before the predetermined victory is announced, all of those bribes are going to be in one location. Rory, Cobby and their liaison, a lackey named Scalvo (singer Jack Harlow, hammiest), will intercept the loot and bring it back to the kingpin. They’re simply going to rip off the grifters. Easy-peasy.

Viewers familiar with the concept of “Murphy’s Law” may be able to see where The Instigators is going before it gets there, and sure enough, everything that can go wrong does go spectacularly wrong. Rory and Cobby quickly find themselves on the lam, a plot twist which unfortunately does not turn the film into an unexpected sequel to 2003’s Gerry — still a vastly underrated slow-cinema gem, in our opinion — but does result in a lot of witty bickering. Damon’s veteran may be a full-blown square, but he still has the sort of deadly, dry sense of humor that you associate with people politely asking if you like picking up your teeth with broken fingers or not. Affleck’s Cobby is a Grade-A motormouth, unable to stop himself from lobbing insults and wisecracks. Their slightly muted Mutt-and-Jeff act works well for them, and only gets better once Chau makes it a threesome — not that kind of threesome — after reluctantly agreeing to be their hostage. (Let us officially state, here and now, that there is not a more reliable actor working in American movies today than Hong Chau. Every single grace note she brings to her character, who keeps punctuating her kidnappers’ panicked declarations with “And how does that make you feel?”, is greatly appreciated.)

The mix of banter and bang-bang crime-thriller elements cuts through the pathos of the gotta-see-my-estranged-son subplot, with the former adding some levity once Liman indulges his inner Hal Needham and starts staging explosions, car chases, and pileups around Boston’s inner city streets. You’re quickly reminded that this filmmaker has made Swingers, Go, and The Bourne Identity, among a gajillion other movies, and seems to be drawing on skill sets honed on all three of those previous works. Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, Toby Jones, and Paul Walter Hauser all drop by to add their touches to an underworld majordomo, a dogged BPD Special Ops officer, a political toady and Boston’s single dumbest thug, respectively. The kind of classic garage-rock and hip-hop cuts you find at your local bar’s jukebox dot the soundtrack. There will be Dunkin’.

It’s tempting to elevate The Instigators to instant cult-crime-comedy status à la The Nice Guys, simply because these kinds of things are now so rare — if nothing else, Damon and Affleck’s Beacon Street Wild Ride reminds you that movie stars plus car crashes, divided by gunshots and laughs, was once part of a regular, balanced American-cinema breakfast. That it now takes streamers like Apple to bankroll cross-genre goofs centered around characters is less a sky-is-falling lament than a fact of life. Clearly, these guys are both fulfilling a creative need by making the kind of film they grew up watching, and having fun tooling around the City of Champions, even if you can feel the fizzle happening before the final bows. That sense of glee in a couple of hometown guys getting away with it is infectious.