At what point do you stop giving a director chances? Any film director can have a slump and recover from it — M. Night Shyamalan made The Last Airbender, but he also made Trap. But at what point do you stop considering the past successes and only focus on the recent failures? Wherever you draw that line, Doug Liman’s latest The Instigators, his second film of 2024, is butting right up against it.
With an all-star cast and a pretty solid premise, it should be hard to mess up, but The Instigators’ shaky script and confusing directing choices turn what could have been a return to form into another nail in a coffin.
The Instigators starts strong: retired, depressed Marine Rory (Matt Damon) joins a ragtag group of criminals to pull off one last heist and provide for his son. The mission is simple: break into the celebration party for sure-thing mayoral candidate Mayor Micceli (Ron Perlman) and steal the countless duffel bags of cash-only under-the-table bribes.
But everything seems to go wrong, from the boat they take to the dockside party to the amount of personnel in every room. But most importantly, Micceli didn’t even win, meaning the winnings were paltry and a faulty map brings them face to face with the losing candidate himself. Rory and his new partner-in-crime Cobby (Casey Affleck) make the best of a bad situation and rob what they can — including the mayor’s bracelet, remember that — and barely escape.
What follows is a loosely tied-together string of attempts between Rory and Cobby to get away from everyone chasing them on every side. It’s mostly an attempt to display epic action sequences for the sake of action sequences with some half-hearted attempts at humor sprinkled in between. It builds to a big reveal that the mayor’s bracelet had the combination of his safe engraved in it, putting Rory and Cobby in a position to change their lives forever.
But by the time you get to that moment, it’s hard to care. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck seem to have switched roles for fun, with Damon playing an oblivious oaf and Affleck attempting to crack wise at every opportunity. Every other cast member is completely underused. Hong Chau, reunited with Damon after Downsizing, finds some time to deliver some actual meaning, even if their one-time chemistry has disappeared.
Paul Walter Hauser’s goofy assassin feels like the perfect counterbalance to the protagonists, only to end up a one-scene character, and the same can be said about Alfred Molina or Jack Harlow. Every minor role is inexplicably filled by a high-profile actor who ends up with nothing to do: even the owner of Cobby’s go-to bar is played by Broadway legend André De Shields.
Every issue boils down to the script, penned by Chuck Maclean and Casey Affleck. While there were a lot of good ideas thrown around, each scene and set piece only works by itself. As part of a bigger whole, the entire plot falls apart. Take the bracelet, this movie’s MacGuffin, for instance: why wasn’t the combination to the safe anywhere else? Why didn’t the mayor simply take a picture of his bracelet at any point or, better yet, memorize it?
If you’re looking for a collection of violent vignettes and don’t care much for plot, then this movie definitely fits the bill. But as a movie, as a long-form narrative of audiovisual entertainment, it’s hard to find any redeeming qualities. Doug Liman isn’t making Go or The Bourne Identity or even Edge of Tomorrow anymore. It looks like his slump is here to stay.
