Doug Liman’s The Instigators begins with Boston crime boss Mr. Besegai (Michael Stuhlbarg) laying out his plan to rob the corrupt Mayor Miccelli (Ron Perlman) on election night. When Besegai’s regular crew falls through, he’s forced to turn to the only men desperate enough to take such a high-risk job on such short notice: Cobby (Casey Affleck), a local barfly with a criminal record, and Rory (Matt Damon), a depressed divorcee who vowed to kill himself in a year’s time if his life didn’t start to improve. And that was about a year ago.
The pair make for an excellent odd couple. Cobby spends the entire film providing a color commentary on the action in a detached monotone. He strikes you as a kind of class clown, the sort of guy who can (and will) tell you what everyone else is doing wrong but who never seems to be able to come up with the right answers in his own life. Rory, on the other hand, finds Damon in full dorky-dad mode as a straitlaced former Marine who likes to take notes and ask endless questions while the heist is being planned, much to the irritation of his colleagues.
While their characters might be out-of-their-depth amateurs, Affleck and Damon are very much in their comfort zone. They have an affably antagonistic chemistry that can be traced back to their Good Will Hunting days, and their stints in the Ocean’s series means that they know just the right tone to hit for this sort of easy-going crime comedy. Because, for all the Boston-ese bantering, this isn’t Ben Affleck’s The Town. Cobby and Rory are thoroughly undangerous figures who bumble their way through the film without ever firing a gun or meaning anyone harm. Even during high-speed chases and armed stand-offs, The Instigators never really tries to conjure any serious sense of menace. It’s here for hijinks, not headshots.
Unsurprisingly, given the caliber of criminals involved, the robbery immediately goes wrong in just about every conceivable way. The election swings in an unexpected direction, the location that was supposed to be empty is full of people, and the safe that was supposed to be full of donor cash is basically empty. Scalvo (Jack Harlow), the hot-headed gangster sent along with Cobby and Rory, makes a few impulsive decisions that send things from bad to worse, and pretty soon our two would-be robbers are running from a bloody crime scene with barely any loot and every cop in Boston on their tails, not to mention a few very pissed-off gangsters.
The film is less cat-and-mouse and more several-cats-and-mouse-and-also-a-big-dog-and-perhaps-a-crocodile-too. From assorted criminal goons to the mayor’s personal manhunter, Frank Toomey (Ving Rhames), The Instigators puts a whole bunch of different parties into play and delights in the chaos caused by their paths crisscrossing and colliding. We never know where Cobby and Rory are going to be attacked from next, or how their various pursuers are going to play off each other, and that keeps us on our toes for the duration of the film.
Throughout The Instigators, some of the plot details concerning the central robbery stretch credibility. It seems unlikely that a politician, even a very corrupt and “old school” one, would leave a huge sum of cash lying around essentially unguarded. And the film itself has so many cogs in motion that it seems to lose track of them at times. Alfred Molina plays a colleague of Besegai’s named Richie who the movie never really finds a purpose for, and the pair of them just sort of wander out of the story around the halfway mark, never to return.
Intellectually speaking, The Instigators is more like Cobby, in that it’s pretty dumb but talks smart, or at least fast enough to ensure that it’s always entertaining. Like a well-executed heist, it knows how to get in and get out with minimal fuss. It’s a fleet-footed crime caper that picks the right men for the job and then gets out of their way. And while The Instigators might not be the richest text that the genre has ever had to offer, it’s unlikely to leave anyone feeling robbed.
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