Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are 'The Instigators' in a classic heist film throwback

When I talk to people over the age of, say, 45, they often ask what happened to Hollywood. It used to make movies filled with stars playing compelling characters. Now, all it offers are pseudo-characters like Deadpool who spend the whole movie making in-jokes about their branded cinematic universe. Where are the stories about human beings?

The short answer is that you can still find a few of them on streaming services. Take the new action comedy The Instigators, now streaming on AppleTV+ after a week in a handful of theaters. Directed by Doug Liman, it stars Casey Affleck (who co-wrote the script) and Matt Damon as likably maladroit Boston crooks who get caught in a robbery gone bad. Despite its forgettable title, The Instigators is an amusing throwback to classic heist pictures, buddy comedies and tales of urban malfeasance.

Damon plays Rory, a depressive screw-up desperate to earn money to pay child support and win back his son’s respect. As a one-time deal, he agrees to help rob the corrupt mayor of Boston — played by a hammy Ron Perlman — at a big election night party where he’ll be given cash bribes. Rory will get a cut of $30,000 which frankly sounds like a figure from the 1970s. So will his fellow crew member Cobby, a wisecracking ex-con played by Affleck.

Through no fault of theirs, the heist goes south in almost every way — the haul is a pittance, a cop gets killed, Cobby catches a bullet. Suddenly thrown together as sidekicks, Cobby and Rory run around Boston pursued by vengeful police, by the crime boss who set up the caper — that’s an also-hammy Michael Stuhlbarg — and by the mayor’s personal enforcer, a slab of a man played by Ving Rhames in full monolith mode. And meanwhile, Cobby keeps bleeding.

Now, it’s an odd feature of movies about Boston that I’ve never seen one that made me want to go there. Indeed, Boston boosters like Damon and Affleck seem to take a weird pride in showing off their city’s corruption, clannish neighborhoods and knuckleheaded blue-collar bravado. That’s certainly true of The Instigators.

It’s not merely that Cobby keeps making insider Boston jokes (in this he is like Deadpool) that won’t play anywhere else. The film’s whole sensibility is tinged by the great Boston writer George V. Higgins whose crime novels, like The Friends of Eddie Coyle, did much to shape the city’s self-image. It romanticizes its refusal to be romantic.

You get that in the performances by Damon and Affleck, two excellent but different actors, here playing guys who aren’t that bright. Where Affleck always seems somewhat off-kilter, even when playing ordinary guys, Damon exudes a normalcy that people now call “relatable.”

As the low-key, sensible Rory, Damon’s the movie’s deadpan wall against which Cobby endlessly hits the tennis ball of his jokey chatter. Affleck and Damon are longtime friends, and you can tell. It’s fun to watch them bicker and stew and drive each other a bit crazy.

Yet even as I was enjoying myself, I kept wishing The Instigators had the lucid snap of the movies it harks back to. While the plot is the kind of confection Hollywood used to be expert at making, the storytelling often feels sludgy, like an indie film. Secondary characters are too lazily drawn to be fun; good jokes too often get lost in the shuffle.

Deep in the movie, Cobby reveals a painful secret that should change Rory’s sense of his new partner. An old-time Hollywood director would’ve known how to move us with both Cobby’s revelation and Rory’s reaction to it. Liman barely lets the emotion register. It’s not that he’s talentless. Most famous for The Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith — he recently did the remake of Road House — he’s just out of practice at telling stories about actual human beings.

But he’s trying. And so are Affleck and Damon, who clearly are the film’s driving force. Back in the 1970s, The Instigators would probably have been the second or third best movie coming out on any given week. In 2024, it’s Hollywood’s best movie this month, at least for viewers who don’t marvel at Marvel.