Lifestyle
Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are 'The Instigators' in a classic heist film throwback
Matt Damon and Casey Affleck become uneasy partners in crime in The Instigators.
Apple TV+
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Apple TV+
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.
Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Carmy (Jeremy Allen White).
FX
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FX
There has always been a metaphorical parallel between The Bear, the television show, and The Bear, the fictional restaurant on the television show. Even as Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) transformed the Italian beef joint into the fancy restaurant of their dreams and wished for a Michelin star, there were undoubtedly locals who thought, “This is great and all, and I’m sure the food is good, but … I liked the beef sandwiches.” There’s still a window at The Bear to get them, but the focus is certainly elsewhere.
When it started, The Bear was mostly about the work that took place in the kitchen. The stresses of too many orders, territoriality from Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the arrival of Sydney, and the tightly wound but undeniably talented Carmy, making everybody both extremely stressed and significantly better. Over time, it shifted and grew, putting together beloved departure episodes like “Fishes” in Season 2, which introduced a boatload of guest stars for a flashback story of a disastrous family dinner before Mikey (Jon Bernthal) died. It spent time with Sydney’s family, it explored the way Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Mikey originally met, it followed Marcus (Lionel Boyce) to Copenhagen, and it went with Richie to work for Andrea (Olivia Colman). All these episodes were excellent. And there was still a kitchen. But the focus seemed to be elsewhere.
At times, the show seemed to have disappeared up its own nose, to the point where you weren’t watching the show The Bear as much as you were watching the phenomenon The Bear. There were too many real-life chef cameos, until it seemed like those chefs were checking a box on a list of “things all the cool kids do.” There were too many other cameos, culminating in a rare miss from the reliably charismatic John Cena. The show placed a lot of narrative weight on Carmy’s love interest, Claire (Molly Gordon) — weight that the underwritten character couldn’t support. But even if every experiment and every diversion had worked, viewers couldn’t be blamed for missing the close focus on the kitchen and the camaraderie — for thinking, “This is all really special, but I do miss the beef sandwiches.”
The fifth and final season dispenses with the departure episodes, and it mostly dispenses with cameos. It all takes place on one day, just after Carmy tells Richie and Sydney that he wants to step back from the restaurant and give it to them and Sugar (Abby Elliott) to run, and it mostly takes place right there at The Bear. Now that the clock set by Jimmy (Oliver Platt) has run out, his money has run out as well, and a series of cascading disasters puts Sydney, Carmy and Richie behind the 8-ball from very early in the day, not least because of the tension hanging over all three of them as they prepare to tell the staff about Carmy’s decision to leave.
Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas).
FX
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FX
We spend this day mostly with the people we know best: our three leads, along with Sugar, Tina, Marcus, and the rest of the staff — including Luca (Will Poulter), who has stayed around to keep working with Marcus. Jimmy is running around with Computer (Brian Koppelman) and a young apprentice of his named Cheese (Elsie Fisher of Eighth Grade), trying to figure out what to do about his finances since it is Jimmy, and not just the restaurant, who’s out of money.
This day takes a while to get cooking, so to speak. The first three episodes of the season are slow, the first two in particular. It’s pouring rain outside, the lighting is dim, and the score maintains the same contemplative melancholy for a long, long time. For about two and a half episodes, it feels like one extended, low-energy scene.
But after that, there’s a shift in tone as the staff looks to get through service, and through seven episodes (FX did not make the finale available in advance for critics), the rest of the season is terrific. What you see is the core story of The Bear, which is people trying to serve food and overcome problems, but through the lens of everything that has happened over the show’s run: Carmy’s retreat from his obsessiveness, Richie’s expansive (and inspiring) discovery of his gift for hospitality; Sydney’s stepping forward from second-in-command to leader; Tina’s complex relationship with the restaurant and her grief over Mikey; Sugar and Carmy’s relationship with Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis); the arrival of Marcus as a high-end pastry chef.
The question the show asks over the last four episodes is: Given all those digressions and flashbacks, given all those visits with families and others, given everything we know about where all these people have been and what they’ve experienced, how does a high-pressure service — of the same kind we used to see in that first season — look now? How do they behave differently, and how does their behavior read differently? How are they the same people we have always known, but at a different juncture, in a different context? How do their wins mean more to them, and to the audience?
On the one hand, making a season this way, there are fewer surprising grace notes, like “Napkins,” the Tina/Mikey flashback episode in Season 3, or “Worms,” the episode in Season 4 where Sydney hung out with her cousin (Danielle Deadwyler) and her cousin’s kid. The Bear feels less daring and more conventional.
But oh, when they have victories under pressure? Victories, large or small? It is immensely, richly satisfying. There’s also more comedy other than just the goofy Faks family than we’ve had in a few seasons; Richie is perhaps the MVP of the season, and that’s partly because of how often he gets to be really funny. Ayo Edebiri continues to be the show’s best reactor, showing Syd eternally a little bit surprised (dismayed?) that she’s chosen to throw in her lot with these people.
There are a couple of questions yet to answer in the finale, both little plot items and broader character resolutions. Over these seven episodes, though, there is much to cheer.
Lifestyle
John Cena wanted to step away from the WWE ring before he became ‘too slow for the show’ : Wild Card with Rachel Martin
A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: First a confession: I have never watched a WWE match in its entirety. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the athleticism and the performance, it’s just not my thing. But there is something about John Cena I’ve never been able to shake.
Yes, he is a wrestling legend, but he has built a career as an entertainer that transcends the ring. The first time I saw him lead a cast was the 2019 family movie “Playing with Fire” and his rapport with kids in that film didn’t seem like acting at all. The man contains multitudes!
He co-stars with Eric Andre in his newest film, “Little Brother.”
Xie Miao and Yang Enyou in The Furious.
Norachai Kajchapanont/Lionsgate
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Norachai Kajchapanont/Lionsgate
There have been some fantastic movies released this year, and we know you can’t see them all. So we’re recommending four recent movies we missed that you should add to your watchlist: The Furious, Tuner, She’s The He, and Heresy.
If you need a few more fun film recommendations, check out these episodes:
Fun movies you may have missed
Our favorite movies on Tubi
We debate the best movies to watch on an airplane
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