Don Shanahan
About an hour into the Apple Original film The Instigators, the shit has hit the fan already more times than there are fans on sale at The Home Depot. Academy Award winners and old buddies Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are Rory and Cobby, two thieves on the run after a botched heist during a mayoral election night party has them looking like cop killers. After an elaborate car chase orchestrated conveniently by the former Jason Bourne, they are cowering in the underbelly of Cobby’s favorite bar with Rory’s Veteran Affairs therapist Dr. Donna Rivera, played by The Whale Oscar nominee Hong Chau, in tow as their “hostage.”
“Hostage” is quoted for The Instigators because Dr. Rivera is there more willingly than in duress to continue to talk Rory out of more trouble. All day, she’s been pushing the therapist jargon and probing every chance she gets. The only duress for her and her “healthy boundaries” has been tolerating the motormouth Cobby. At this moment of tension and hiding from the long arm of the law, Cobby can’t resist asking her for a clinical diagnosis right this second. As soon as he asks “What’s wrong with me,” the eye roll from Donna says it all and she lets him have it.
Without missing a syllable, Dr. Rivera rattles off the immediate label of adult Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder “stemming from from an early childhood disrupted attachment complex” and, yes, that’s a real thing. Cobby holds for a full six seconds— the longest he’s paused his yapper seemingly the entire movie other than being passed out from blood loss after being shot– before attempting to brush it off with a “Nah, that’s not it.” The unfazed doctor pokes further and simplifies herself to say “When someone tells you the truth, you talk so you don’t have to hear it.” Cobby unfurls the final word to say “You know, I’m starting to understand why so many of your patients shoot themselves.”
That extended verbal spat right there is The Instigators in a semi-humorous nutshell. There’s someone meek trying to do the right thing, an unfiltered slickster setting off most of the mistakes, and the smartest and most honest person in the room no one listens to. All three of them find themselves surrounded by and forced into action by a myriad of ferocious tough talkers made to look like boobs. Everyone good and bad piles on the inherent trust issues. Why? That’s because the script demands our two famous nincompoops play loosely dashing Robin Hood types who should be getting away with their hometown Boston mayhem.
Let’s rewind The Instigators a bit. Rory and Cobby were hired by Mr. Besegai (a seething Michael Stuhlbarg, a long way from Call Me By Your Name) to backup his man Scalvo (Jack Harlow of the recent White Men Can’t Jump remake) robbing a safe-load of off-the-books collected cash (and some other key MacGuffin loot) from the scheduled victory party of the incumbent Mayor Miccelli (Hellboy’s Ron Perlman) after a runoff election against his minority opponent Mark Choi (newcomer Ronny Cho). Rory is the straight arrow and first-time hood trying to earn exactly $32,480 in back legal fees and child support to see his teenage son. The bitter Cobby is there to work with Besegai again after not ratting him or his crew out on a previous failed score that put him behind bars for a stretch. That setup of The Instigators brings us back to all that shit and all those fans mentioned earlier.
It also brings us back to the action of asking pertinent questions. Neither Rory, Cobby, Salvo, and definitely not Dr. Rivera are expert crime professionals. Their failure and fallout grips the city’s authorities and puts a horde of different adversaries on their tails, from Paul Walter Houser’s Booch working as Besegai’s clean-up man to the chapeaued and marauding Ving Rhames as Special Operations Unit officer Frank Toomey rumbling through Beantown on retrieval orders from Mayor Miccelli. Most of the antics in The Instigators are dragged out by imbecilic back-and-forth tirades of asking clarifying questions in the moment–like that scene in the bar described earlier–and not with the preferred wisdom to ask them before or the keen reflection to ask them after.
That aura of flippant consternation in The Instigators is frustrating for both the characters and the audience. Prolific action director Doug Liman (The Edge of Tomorrow, Road House) reunites with his The Bourne Identity star Matt Damon and knows exactly where the accelerator is if the movie wants to use it. Stunt coordinator Mark Fichera (Smile, Sharper) and composer Christophe Beck (Shazam! Fury of the Gods) turn up the heist movie treadmill speeds here and there for gleeful property damage set to an electronic beat. However, like the fumbling would-be criminal leads who don’t know how to quit when they’re ahead or give up when they are losing, the screenplay written by Casey Affleck and his buddy Chuck Maclean cannot decide when run and when to talk.
Consequently, The Instigators comes off like an unbalanced buddy comedy trying to chirp jokes during a grizzled crime thriller. Sure enough, it’s wonderful seeing Casey Affleck shuck the morose persona he’s been leaning on for the last decade across films like Dreamin’ Wild last year, his big winner Manchester by the Sea, and his collaborations with David Lowery in A Ghost Story and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints to play the loquacious rascal. Unfortunately, he’s all by himself. With known charisma and ability in either of those aforementioned subgenres, Matt Damon feels like a waste of talent to play the unlaughing and tame Rory next to Casey’s Cobby. Let him loose. Likewise, Hong Chau is certainly game to shove the boys around in the intelligence department, but she’s only written to be the ignored voice of reason and a weakly planted potential love interest stuck in a groan-inducing and inescapable therapy session.
The true culprit for the wholly imbalance may in fact be the chosen urban setting of The Instigators. Like Patriot’s Day and Stronger in recent memory, Boston and, more specifically, the suburb of Quincy show up to strut their perceived cocky and coarse virility. Repeatedly and without fail in The Instigators, when good ideas or smart replies are given to many of the befuddling questions asked, “Shut the fuck up” is the most common and repeated answer. The phrase is doled out like it’s an acceptably shared pleasantry equal to “Bless your heart” south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The exchanges of edgy profanity may count as some of the best entertainment present, but at some point we’re saying that phrase too right back at the movie itself.
