“The Instigators,” co-written by Casey Affleck and Chuck MacLean and directed by Doug Liman, starts promisingly enough because it has a veritable Fort Knox of golden stars with one of the best casts to grace the screen. Matt Damon (Rory) is one of the greatest actors of his generation and his mere presence keeps this film going until the story implodes and he is forced to create a character and actions out of whole cloth. Casey Affleck (Cobby), so often good in other people’s movies, never quite rises above a smirk. The sinister bad guy played by Michael Stuhlbarg (Besegai) gives a hilariously resigned performance that rises above the material. Alfred Molina (Richie), like Stuhlbarg, is able to make a believable (and I use that term lightly) henchman/baker full of irony. You will sense Ving Rhames’ (Frank Toomey) presence before you hear his mellifluous bass or see his face, full of resignation. He is seen too rarely and his mere appearance gives believability to the most incomprehensible situations. Hong Chau, one of the most versatile actresses working today, plays Rory’s therapist warmly with an evident undercurrent of humor. Constantly asking Rory how he feels is a running joke that at least brings a sense of playfulness to the outlandish things this script asks of her.
“The Instigators” is a heist film where the stakes are high and the intelligence of almost all concerned is low. Early on we see Richie waterboarding a dimwitted associate, Scalvo, as Besegai laments how hard it is to find good help these days. He has a surefire scheme to rake in a huge haul and no one to help. Scalvo, a guy with a short fuse, no judgment and not enough wattage to illuminate a closet, insists that he can gather a crew and do the job. Remarkably, Besegai puts Scalvo in charge of this sensitive operation.
The night in question, the corrupt mayor of Boston will be holding his reelection party and every grifter, grafter and contractor in the city will be paying fealty to His Honor in the guise of envelopes stuffed with large sums of cash that will go straight into the safe in his room. The mission of Scalvo and his crew is to rob the safe. The mayor will never report the theft and Besegai and Richie will be all the richer once Scalvo and his crew, consisting of ex-con Cobby and the out-of-left-field recruit Rory make their entrance. What could go wrong?
This is where I leave you because if I continued I’d be giving away the entirely implausible plot points and truly unfathomable segues. Suffice it to say, what were they thinking? This amateurish script and unruly direction works on the premise that speedy dialogue, car chases and crashes will take your mind off how woebegone everything is.
Billed as an action comedy crime thriller, there’s plenty of action, a lot of crime, no psychological thrills and very few, if any, laugh-out-loud moments. Liman, subscribing to the philosophy of more is never enough, believes that when in doubt, crash some cars and blow up some buildings. Actually, it’s crash a lot of cars and blow up a lot of buildings. But in any heist movie, plausible or not, you need characters to believe in so you willingly follow them down a rabbit hole. Short of that, action films, comic or otherwise, need impeccable timing to keep the viewer following action that seamlessly goes from one catastrophe to another with little time to breathe in between. The “Mission: Impossible” movies go from one implausible situation to another, taking you along for the ride because the timing is practically perfect and there are characters you care about. It’s the thrill ride that “The Instigators” is not. Ironically, I can see why this script might have been fun to read and attract such a great cast. On paper, the robbery, the mistakes, the chases would have been imagined as fast and hilarious. Not necessarily meaty, this is almost a Robin Hood adventure where gold is taken from the rich and corrupt to be given to the rich and corrupt. It’s pure speculation that this would ever have worked, but it needed a lighter, faster hand than Limon exhibited here.
I was overwhelmingly disappointed in this film that I was so looking forward to seeing. Jam-packed with some of my favorite actors, the director and writers failed them. Limen, no doubt, felt he could correct the inadequacies and incongruities of a script written by the inexperienced writers, Affleck and MacLean, by just blowing things up. The actors all looked like they were having a grand old time; I wish I had. It didn’t work. Pure and simple, none of this worked. Never has so little been made from so much.
Opening Aug. 2 at the Laemmle Monica. Streaming on Apple TV+ on Aug. 9.
Neely Swanson spent most of her professional career in the television industry, almost all of it working for David E. Kelley. In her last full-time position as Executive Vice President of Development, she reviewed writer submissions and targeted content for adaptation. As she has often said, she did book reports for a living. For several years she was a freelance writer for “Written By,” the magazine of the WGA West, and was adjunct faculty at USC in the writing division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Neely has been writing film and television reviews for the “Easy Reader” for more than 10 years. Her past reviews can be read on Rotten Tomatoes where she is a tomato-approved critic.
