Director Doug Liman's Boston-set film stars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as a couple of knuckleheads thrown together for a poorly planned heist job. 'Sometimes a movie can have all the right components and none of them wind up working together,' writes WBUR critic Sean Burns.
Director Doug Liman’s “The Instigators” has some of my favorite actors brandishing brusquely funny Boston attitudes while running around making mischief in the city I love. So why does the film fall so flat? Sometimes a movie can have all the right components and none of them wind up working together. “The Instigators” is a listless and confusingly overcrowded picture, with plot tangents working at cross-purposes.
The two are tasked with knocking over the election night party of a cheerfully corrupt, longtime Boston mayor in the spirit of James Michael Curley. He’s played by Ron Perlman in a performance larger than it is convincing. A hood played with a shocking lack of charisma by rapper Jack Harlow assures our boys that there will be hundreds of thousands of dollars in unsecured cash bribes floating around the party.
The screenplay was written by Affleck and Chuck MacLean, whose short-lived Showtime series “City on a Hill” was something of a townie burlesque starring Kevin Bacon as a corrupt FBI agent taking on Charlestown armored car thieves in the early 1990s. There are some admittedly amusing local gags, as when Cobby explains that learning how to hotwire a car is “part of the public-school curriculum in Quincy.
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