Most heist movies depend on staying a step or two ahead of the audience from the start and remaining there until — at just the right moment — everything is suddenly allowed to click into place like the combination of a loaded jewel safe. We’re told almost every detail of Danny Ocean’s plan to rob the biggest casinos in Vegas, but that “almost” is enough to blindside us at the best possible moment. The first act of “Gambit” walks us through Harry Tristan Dean’s burglary of a priceless Chinese bust as if we’ll be tested on it later, but only so the film can pull the wool over our eyes by weaponizing that knowledge against it. Even the heist movies where the shit hits the fan and sticks to the ceiling (“Rififi” and “The League of Gentleman” come to mind) hinge on a sense that the characters are better at stealing things than anyone else is at stopping them.
For better or worse, Doug Liman’s “The Instigators” is not most heist movies. Flimsy in most respects but fun enough in its fumbling, “The Instigators” can’t stay a step or two ahead of the audience because its dumbass heroes — an unlikely pair of Bostonian deadbeats who bear an uncanny resemblance to members of Danny Ocean’s crew — can’t put one foot in front of the other without tripping over themselves. These are not the guys a criminal mastermind calls when they want a job done right. These are the guys a third-rate hoodlum calls when nobody else will pick up the phone, and they only have a few days to prep for the score of a lifetime.
That’s the only reason why doltish ex-Marine Rory (Matt Damon) and drunken ex-con Cobby (Casey Affleck) find themselves boosting millions’ worth of dirty money from the mayor’s re-election night party at the behest of a desperate goon named Mr. Besegai. He’s played by a bushy and bristling Michael Stuhlbarg, whose every line is a screaming variation of “how could you fuck this up!?” But we already know the answer to that question, as “The Instigators” is only a few minutes old before things go immediately, amusingly, catastrophically wrong in a way that leaves Rory and Cobby scrambling through Boston with the city’s entire police department on their tails.
And so a good bad heist gives way to a bad good one, as these affable idiots try to steal themselves out of a city that’s closing in around them. Rory and Cobby are left without a clue, or a plan, or anything for us to hold onto beyond the faint suggestion that the characters and the actors playing them both deserve better, even if they all largely have themselves to blame (Affleck co-wrote the script with Chuck Maclean, while Damon co-produced the film with Casey’s older brother). The fact is that we spend most of this mid-energy misadventure waiting for the criminals to catch up with us, making “The Instigators” the rare heist movie that isn’t nearly convoluted enough to feel like it can get away with anything.
To that end, it helps a great deal that Rory and Cobby are the film’s most valuable assets. “The Instigators” might be plotted in a way that fails to make good on its premise, but Damon and Affleck do their best to ensure that it gets the little things right. They both play different shades of incompetence in similarly entertaining ways. Rory is as diligent as he is dumb, and Damon textures the guy with the studious nobility of a night school student who hopes the big heist will be the first chapter of his life’s second act — either that, or he’s killing himself. Rory doesn’t want to get rich, he just wants the $32,480 it will take to pay off his child support or whatever (“The Instigators” isn’t much interested in those details), and he arrives at Mr. Besegai’s prep session packing a notepad and a newbie’s curiosity, neither of which amuses the kid who Besegai has obviously hired to eliminate Rory and Cobby after the score (rapper Jack Harlow).
Cobby is a bit more accustomed to the criminal underworld, but that doesn’t mean he’s any happier to be a part of it. Soggy with a sadness that belies his own secret virtue, the guy runs his mouth so that he doesn’t have to hear his thoughts, and he’s so hopelessly resigned to his fate that he doesn’t even try to change it; rather than reflect on why there’s a breathalyzer installed on his motorcycle, he simply gets random kids to breathe into it for him. There isn’t a ton more to it than that, but “The Instigators” gets a much-needed spark from the sense that Rory and Cobby are eager to learn from each other, and that — more than Liman’s weak attempts to juice the action with a sudden rattle of the camera or a contrapuntal needle drop during a car chase — is what keeps this movie on two legs as it grows increasingly desperate for a way out of the dragnet.
Damon and Affleck are low-key one of the most perfectly measured duos of the last 25 years (maybe even better than Damon and the other Affleck, whose “Good Will Hunting” screen dynamic was so iconic that it lent all their reunions a whiff of schtick), so it’s no surprise that they bounce off of each other so well here, but their natural chemistry is more pronounced in the context of a movie where everything around them feels so forced, and their characters’ grounding idiocy is more refreshing in the context of a movie that betrays that realism at every turn.
Are Rory and Cobby dumb enough to believe that Mr. Besegai’s goons (including Paul Walter Hauser) were dispatched to help them rather than to tie up loose ends? Possibly. Is anyone dumb enough to believe that Cobby could outdrive every cop in New England? Or that his shrink (Hong Chau suffering through a sitcom-ified role) would keep up the therapy-speak during a high-speed chase? Or that the mayor (Ron Perlman, chewing the scenery as a garrulous Trump caricature) would make his dirty money so easy to find? “The Instigators” demands too much suspension of disbelief to generate so little suspense in return, and while that approach tees up a satisfying deus ex machina in the movie’s final moments — one that makes good on a story about the heroism of honest criminals in a world corrupted by greed — it wastes a ridiculously deep bench of great actors in the process.
Speaking of crimes, it should be a felony to fumble Alfred Molina this badly, as his non-part as Mr. Besegai’s mild-mannered partner is as bland and bleary as Henry Braham’s lifeless digital cinematography. Only Ving Rhames — playing the mayor’s tank-driving enforcer — leaves a positive impression, if only because it’s so nice to see him talking to someone besides Ethan Hunt. That the rest of the supporting cast is given so little to chew on is a massive disservice in a movie whose only consistent pleasure is watching actors you like being actors you like.
Then again, maybe it’s fitting that “The Instigators” doesn’t offer anything more valuable than its characters are interested in taking, or provide anything more competent than their criminal talents might allow. For some movies, the fun isn’t in being surprised so much as it is in the knowledge that you won’t be. Rarely are those movies heist movies, of course, but this isn’t most heist movies, and its affable clumsiness — in lieu of anything else — eventually comes to be seen as its own reward.
Grade: C
Apple Original Films will release “The Instigators” in select theaters on Friday, August 2. It will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting Friday,August 9.
