By JT REID for the Keizertimes
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death, taxes, and me appreciating Matt Damon in everything he is in. Is it really any wonder that the cinematic U.S. constantly spends billions of dollars trying to retrieve him from places, whether it be in German-occupied France or Mars? Naturally I wanted to watch The Instigators for no other reason than to send good vibes Matt’s way if he was captured or something, but it turns out these vibes weren’t really needed—sure, he and Casey Affleck are in constant danger of getting arrested and killed in this comedy heist film, but the stakes feel ridiculously low because The Instigators never manages to make me care about anything that’s going on.
Sure, the characters share some perfunctory backstories with each other in one scene to explain why they want to rob Ron Perlman’s character. But this is all the audience gets; it wasn’t until I was an hour or so into the film that it even dawned on me that Affleck was supposed to be the loudmouth funny one and Damon was supposed to be the comically stoic one. Not even these broad archetypes were clear because the jokes just aren’t that funny. I did not connect to anyone on an emotional level because one scene is not enough to tell us who the characters are, and I did not care on a comedic level because the jokes aren’t amusing enough to keep me invested just by themselves. And if the main characters are one-dimensional then I don’t even know what the supporting characters are… according to Wikipedia zero-dimensional space is a thing and “a graphical illustration of a zero-dimensional space is a point,” but I’d argue that the perfect example of zero-dimensional space would instead be Perlman, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, and the rest of the exceptional supporting cast doing… whatever it is they do in this movie.
The banter between Damon and Affleck can only be described as “Bostonian,” and this back-and-forth occasionally provides energy in the otherwise boring and painfully lifeless story, even if it never reaches the level of laugh-out-loud funny. And although it’s nice to understand the entirety of a heist film for once (usually the genre shows an addiction to needless complexity), the story is almost too basic in its straightforwardness. There are no interesting twists, no unexpected reveals. We get from point A to point B on a mostly flat line, and by the end I just wanted to shrug and move onto something else.
The Instigatorsis not unwatchable with its talented cast (they do their best with what is given to them) and fast-ish pace (it might be boring and lifeless but at least it’s not slow, boring and lifeless), but it is not something that showcases anything impressive either. If only we could have saved Matt from this mediocre script, but I guess you can’t win them all.
The Instigators is now available on Apple TV+.
