REVIEW:
The Instigators is a fun movie. It’s pretty much everything you would want and hope for in a movie like this, and yet it’s also kind of forgettable. That’s a strange combination. How can a movie that does everything right be so inconsequential? Let me explain.
This movie is Boston strong. It stars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, two lifelong buddies (Damon famously is best friends with Casey’s big brother, Ben) who have known each other since they were kids. These two even got their big breaks together with Damon’s movie, Good Will Hunting. Well, now they’re back together in Boston, the town they know so well and grew up in. It all seems very familiar. From Damon in Boston movies like Hunting and the Departed to Affleck in Gone Baby Gone, Boston is a part of the DNA for these guys. And it’s nice to have them back there.
But the movie is about low level criminals taking on some high level crime. These guys are such low-key dud characters and it’s actually fun to watch. Especially for Damon. He’s playing a nice guy who is just an idiot. It’s a role we have not seen Damon play before, and he handles it really well. Affleck, on the other hand, plays the smarter, and more untrusting of the two. He’s onto the idea that everything involved with politics and the mayor is corrupt. And he’s got a plan for how to get the mayor’s money.
And that leads us to a series of capers that these two get involved in. Most of them go terribly wrong. There’s plenty of comedy to be had here, although none of it is laugh out loud funny. And that goes to the idea of why this is forgettable. There’s nothing too original here that we haven’t seen before. It’s a fun genre for these guys to play in and they do a nice job, but in terms of creativity, this movie doesn’t have a ton. What it does have is a solid and likeable cast including Ving Rhames, Ron Perlman, and Michael Stuhlbarg. It’s a Doug Liman directed movie (Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity,) and it’s about a thousand times better than the last movie he made, the Jake Gylenhsl Road House remake. This one is definitely enjoyable, it just doesn’t have a long lasting effect afterwards.