The Instigators feels like an enigma of a movie. It boasts a star-studded cast featuring Ving Rhames, Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina and Ron Perlman and highlighted by the great Matt Damon and Casey Affleck. Yet, it is so unbelievably average and unimpressive despite this. The film was produced by Apple Studios and released by Apple TV+ with a shockingly limited theatrical run. Yet, when it hit Apple TV+ just 7 days after it’s premier, it’s been largely forgotten about and will inevitably roll by the wayside of so many other meager action flicks.
The film follows ex-marine Rory and ex-con Cobby (Damon and Affleck), two average dudes who get enlisted to pull off a heist during election night for the mayorship of Boston. When the heist goes incredibly wrong, the pair find themselves on the run from both police and criminal underbelly alike and can’t seem to get out of their own way doing so.
What really disappoints me the most about The Instigators is just how much Damon and Affleck seem to be in autopilot here. Granted, there’s not a ton to work with in a generic action film like this one, but really the pair seem to be phoning it in a bit here. That’s not to say that they’re still not enjoyable, but aside from their chemistry together, it really doesn’t work well.
The film is also billed as a heist-comedy, but it seriously lacks both aspects of the genre. The “heist” takes up the first 20ish minutes of the film and then there’s nothing the rest of the way and the film is shockingly unfunny.
The action isn’t terrible, which isn’t a great feature for a film billed as an action flick, but it won’t be horrendous to watch either. It was pretty obvious though that as the movie they had to keep upping the stakes to keep any semblance of interest from viewers. But with that, any semblance of realism gets chucked out of a moving train fairly quickly. Couple that with how dysfunctional the main characters are and it’s really unbelievable that they’d be able to do any of the wacky plots that occur throughout The Instigators.
Final Thoughts
The Instigators is a painfully average film that I can’t help but not enjoy. Despite a star-studded cast with some of my favorite actors in it, there’s very little to make it anything above average. It’s bound to be lost in the time capsule of average-to-bad action films made by streaming companies.
