Despite the star-studded cast, heist comedy 'The Instigators' falls flat (2024)

Director Doug Liman’s “The Instigators” has some of my favorite actors brandishing brusquely funny Boston attitudes while running around making mischief in the city I love. So why does the film fall so flat? Sometimes a movie can have all the right components and none of them wind up working together. “The Instigators” is a listless and confusingly overcrowded picture, with plot tangents working at cross-purposes. There’s all sorts of stuff going on here that I usually like, yet a few times during the movie I found myself leaning forward in my seat, wondering why I wasn’t enjoying it more.

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck star as Rory and Cobby, a couple of knuckleheads thrown together for a poorly planned heist job at the behest of a hirsute local crime boss (Michael Stuhlbarg, struggling mightily with the accent) who works out of Bova’s Bakery in the North End. Damon’s Rory is a suicidally depressed, deadbeat dad, first seen matter-of-factly lamenting his failures to a therapist played by Hong Chau. It’s an off-putting way to start a caper comedy, though things pick up when we meet Affleck’s Cobby, an alcoholic ex-con fresh out of Walpole who recruits children from the playground to blow into the court-mandated breathalyzer lock on his motorcycle.

The two are tasked with knocking over the election night party of a cheerfully corrupt, longtime Boston mayor in the spirit of James Michael Curley. He’s played by Ron Perlman in a performance larger than it is convincing. A hood played with a shocking lack of charisma by rapper Jack Harlow assures our boys that there will be hundreds of thousands of dollars in unsecured cash bribes floating around the party. We can be pretty sure that this is all going to go wrong when Affleck points out that the building schematic they’re using came from a Zillow listing. (I guess this is what happens when you let Jack Harlow plan your robbery.) Turns out there’s not a lot of cash at the party after all, and the mayor just lost the election in a surprise upset and is refusing to concede. Then somebody shoots the police commissioner.

From this not unpromising setup, “The Instigators” spins out in several different directions. For a while, our boys are on the run with Damon’s therapist as a hostage, leading to a few funny scenes with the no-nonsense Chau fending off Affleck’s awkward advances. But the film can’t settle on a clear objective for the characters, who I might quibble don’t actually instigate anything and are mostly passive participants in the unwieldy plot. There’s also never a clear antagonist for these two, with a crooked supercop played by Ving Rhames drifting in and out of the picture seemingly at his leisure, and beloved character actors like Paul Walter Hauser wasted in colorless mob enforcer roles. The great Alfred Molina is reduced to standing silently behind Stuhlbarg for a handful of scenes, a criminal squandering of resources.

The screenplay was written by Affleck and Chuck MacLean, whose short-lived Showtime series “City on a Hill” was something of a townie burlesque starring Kevin Bacon as a corrupt FBI agent taking on Charlestown armored car thieves in the early 1990s. There are some admittedly amusing local gags, as when Cobby explains that learning how to hotwire a car is “part of the public-school curriculum in Quincy.” The character is the kind of slurry Boston dirtbag Casey Affleck can play in his sleep and make me laugh every time. But his rapport with Damon feels a little off here.

The two have been working together regularly since 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” with my favorite of their collaborations being Gus Van Sant’s transcendent 2002 masterpiece “Gerry,” in which the actors — who wrote the script together and both play characters named Gerry — get lost on a hike that stretches out into a surreal experimental landscape. Just last year, Damon was the perfect hype man for Affleck’s terrifying Colonel Pash in “Oppenheimer,” one of modern movies’ scariest one-scene roles. Yet in “The Instigators” their chemistry never quite clicks.

Damon playing a downbeat depressive opposite Affleck’s lackadaisical, seen-it-all career criminal leaves a void of energy at the center of the movie. These outsized action sequences really needed one of them to be a worrywart, instead of two guys trying to out blasé each other. They seem to be trying for a “Blues Brothers” stoicism but lack the edge of absurdist cool. Chau brings a similarly downcast vibe, causing scenes that should theoretically be fun to flatline.

Director Liman is one of the more difficult filmmakers to pin down. He’s responsible for smart, fizzy pop entertainments like “The Bourne Identity” and “Edge of Tomorrow” as well as absolute dreck like this past spring’s cursed “Road House” remake. “The Instigators” has individual passages of energetic filmmaking — there’s a terrific car chase early in the picture — and also a lot of stalled-out scenes that go nowhere. It’s a very busy movie with little sense of forward momentum. It seems like even Liman can’t keep track of all the characters. By the time we cut back to Stuhlbarg and Molina during the closing credits, I’d forgotten they were in the film.

“The Instigators” is being granted a token theatrical release before heading to its forever home on Apple TV+ next Friday, Aug. 9. I wish I could have watched it in a theater myself, because I love seeing Boston on the big screen. This is the part of the review where I usually complain about how the streaming service business model is a blight on cinema culture, but even I must admit that a film like “The Instigators” will benefit from the diminished expectations of being watched at home while you’re doing laundry.

“The Instigators” is now in theaters and starts streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday, Aug. 9.