Review: In ‘The Instigators,’ a heist goes terrifically wrong

Though depression lurks around the edges of “The Instigators,” Doug Liman’s heist movie is a loosely amiable return to South Boston for Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who also co-wrote the film.

In the film’s opening moments, Rory (Damon), a former Marine, tells his therapist, Dr. Rivera (Hong Chau), that after a lifetime of screw ups and disappointments, he’s not so much forlorn as simply ready to “cash in” his ticket. His phrase is a telling one for a film where midlife disappointments and a ramshackle heist-gone-wrong plot collide in farcical ways. As a last-ditch effort and to raise $32,480 for his child support payments, Rory signs up with a criminal band of misfits to steal election-night payouts to a corrupt Boston mayor (Ron Perlman) running for reelection.

Therapists have made their ways into crime dramas like “The Sopranos,” but “The Instigators” (in theaters Thursday, on Apple TV+ Aug. 9) adds a novel wrinkle by bringing Dr. Rivera along for the ride. When Rory and Cobby (Affleck) go on the run, she tags along as a hostage by choice.

But it takes a little time for the buddy comedy to develop. First, “The Instigators” works in a large percentage of today’s top character actors — among them Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, Toby Jones and Paul Walter Hauser — all of whom raise the bar in this rudderless but winningly shaggy action comedy.

Liman, the director of “Go,” “The Bourne Identity” and the recent “Road House,” has always had a knack for freewheeling ensembles and for getting the most out of his stars’ charisma. “The Instigators” may be a modern streaming movie but it’s a decidedly old-school kind of caper, stock full of local color and peopled with faces you’re happy to see. It’s a product of Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artists Equity, which produced the film from the script by Casey Affleck and “City on the Hill” creator Chuck MacLean.

For them, the blue-collar Boston terrain of “The Instigators” is about as a cozy as bleacher seat in Fenway Park. “The Instigators” doesn’t live up to other Damon-Afflecks Beantown-set movies (“Good Will Hunting,” “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town”), and some of their Dunkin’ Donuts-adjacent schtick is at least approaching stale. You could call it a homecoming but it’s more like they never left.

So, yes, this is them very much in their element, but that goes especially true for Affleck, the main reason to see “The Instigators.” His Cobby is a drunk and convict who enlists in the heist out of a lack of other options. It’s an ill-considered scheme by a pair of small-time gangsters (Stuhlbarg, Molina), one of whom runs a bakery as a front. They dispatch a trigger-happy small-time crook (Jack Harlow) to lead the mission, a debacle from the get go. Nothing goes right, not even the expected election result, and out of the melee clatter Cobby and Rory, with a special police investigator (Rhames) in steadfast pursuit.

On the run, their double act — Damon’s earnest deadpan, Affleck’s smart-aleck flippancy — works as well as it ever has, even if the script could use a touch more wit. Affleck makes up for it with his melancholic motormouth routine, one that gets an even better foil once Chau, the talented co-star of “The Whale” and “Showing Up,” is roped into their escape. Though Liman knows how to mix action and comedy as well as anyone, “The Instigators” is better whenever there’s less going on.

“The Instigators,” an Apple release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for pervasive language and some violence. Running time: 101 minutes. In Finnish with English subtitles. Three stars out of four.