While it has some fun and funny moments here and there, the bafflingly choppy and bloated action comedy The Instigators is a mess of competing ideas that never gel or go anywhere. Considering that this is a re-teaming of star Matt Damon with best friend adjacent co-star Casey Affleck and director The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman (with the addition of Ben Affleck credited as a producer), the overall sloppiness of The Instigators feels like a mystery. How can such people who have worked together before to great results come up with something so willfully stupid and narratively bankrupt? It boggles the mind what could’ve gone wrong here, and the fact that they drag a thoroughly misused all star cast down with them makes things worse.
Damon and Affleck play mismatched Boston area criminal misfits Rory and Cobby, respectively. Rory is a former Marine and self-admitted screw-up who’s never dabbled in crime before, but needs to come up with a specific amount of cash to cover back child support and other bills if he wants to see his son again. Cobby is a hard drinking ex-con with few prospects and an always running mouth that gets him in trouble. So far, so good, right? Damon is good at playing a noble sad sack, and Affleck has a penchant for playing the prototypical Boston smartass. Sounds like a recipe for success, especially in an action-comedy setting.
But as soon as the plot kicks into high gear, mere minutes into the film, it’s wildly apparent that The Instigators (co-written by Affleck and Chuck MacLean) has undergone a massive amount of retooling along the way. The Instigators starts throwing characters and wrinkles at the viewer immediately, and without giving any reason for caring. There’s no first act to set anything up or to ease the viewer in. Just cursory introductions and Liman is off to the races. Granted, this is partially so big character reveals can come up later in the film during some of its forced moments of tenderness, but it’s the mechanics and elaborate nature of the film’s ludicrously implausible plot that end up dooming The Instigators before it even gets started.
Rory and Cobby are recruited by a low-level hood (Jack Harlow) on behalf of a criminal kingpin (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his bakery owning henchman (Alfred Molina). The job: rob the cash rich “fundraiser” party of the corrupt Boston mayor (Ron Perlman) on the night of a run-off election where he’s “almost assured” to be voted back into. Naturally, things don’t go according to plan and Rory and Cobby don’t get away with much. What they do get away with is a gold bracelet owned by the mayor that he really wants back. Oh, and the guy that hired them also wants them dead to tie up loose ends after the screw up. Rory and Cobby are on the run (not really going far outside the city limits, because what kind of movie would it be if they did the smart thing), and trying to stay ahead of the mayor’s choice of hulking thug (an uncredited Ving Rhames) and their employer’s choice of hulking thug (Paul Walter Hauser).
What a damned cast The Instigators has, and what a shame that they have… Oh, wait. I forgot something. At one point they stop to get Cobby some medical help, and they end up taking Rory’s therapist (Hong Chau, thoroughly wasted, yet third billed) hostage. Ok. As I was saying before: what a damned cast The Instigators has, and what an absolute shame that every single one of them from the top down (save for Affleck who can do this kind of schtick in his sleep) is thoroughly wasted. Some of these roles have obviously been cut down to cameo length, and there are always hints that there was a lot more to this story than appears on screen. Harlow and Hauser are good enough to make the viewer want more. Stuhlbarg (laying the BAW-STOHN accent on thick as possible) starts off as the chief villain and makes an awesome first impression, but the movie straight up forgets he’s even a thing about halfway through, meaning Perlman – who’s fine, but less interesting – the main villain. OH. WAIT. I also forgot the OTHER villain, Toby Jones, as the mayor’s shifty lackey.
Liman (Go, Edge of Tomorrow, the fun Road House remake from earlier in the year) has been gifted an embarrassment of riches with this cast, and his chops as an action stylist mean the set pieces are at least going to have some degree of visual ingenuity. But where did all of the plot and character in The Instigators go? Clocking in at a tight 100 minutes or so, The Instigators can’t paper over the fact that at least twenty minutes of anything that could explain what’s going on, why the viewer should care, and who these people truly are has evaporated. Visually, Liman’s work is impressive (with an exciting car chase into the tunnels under Boston emerging as a big standout), Damon has great chemistry with the younger Affleck, and none of the supporting cast is phoning in their parts, so all evidence points to this being a project that has been sliced to absolute ribbons.
Maybe things were moving too slow, which is hard to believe since the film has almost no start and a punishingly long, talky climax that isn’t particularly exciting. Maybe someone along the way balked at all of the psychological profiling going on between Chau and the two leads, which seems to be a big deal in the eyes of all parties involved, but only ends up adding some tiresome jokes, and the whole thread keeps getting forgotten about in the same fashion as Stuhlbarg and Molina are. Or maybe someone wanted to ditch the plot entirely and just focus on the action-comedy beats, but that ignores the fact that the actual machinations of the story are so ludicrously unbelievable from the jump that there’s nothing for the viewer to latch onto in the first place. The Instigators is an absolute mess of a movie that never bothers to count the sum of its parts, let alone add them up. There’s potential for a fun lark throughout The Instigators, but it’s buried under a mess of competing visions of what kind of lark that should be.
The Instigators opens in theatres and streams on Apple TV+ starting Friday, August 2, 2024.
