Easy, he said. A sure thing, he said. A great payday for 15 minutes of work, he said.
Well, Mr. Besegai said wrong.
Sure, any good crook would know that easy, lucrative, sure crime heistsare rare. And robbing Boston’s corrupt mayor? Yeah, that adds a few layers of difficulty.
But this caper doesn’t come with a good crook.
This is Rory’s first robbery. Ever. The former Marine might’ve been hired because of his military training, but he was a mechanic. Change a sparkplug, and Rory’s your guy. Be Jason Bourne? Not so much.
Coppy, the crew’s ever-chatty second man, has at least some experience in crime. Why, he even did a three-year stint behind bars—which, come to think of it, doesn’t exactly instill confidence. (Ideally, you try not to get caught.)
And the point man, Scalvo? Well, let’s just say he’s seen Scarface a few too many times.
But Besegai insists that even this crew can pull it off. All they need to do is raid Mayor Miccelli’s re-election victory party. Boston businessmen and contractors will be lining up to drink his champagne, kiss his ring and pay his obligatory bribe. The crooked politician will probably pocket several hundred thousand dollars in tax-free graft before the liquor’s gone—and it’ll be all in cash.
So all our crew must do is get in after the party’s over, tie up a handful of straggling workers, force the mayor’s lackey to hand over the moolah and leave by 6:07 p.m., before an armored truck arrives.
Easy. Lucrative. And as sure a sure thing as the mayor’s own inevitable victory.
Only the mayor doesn’t win.
Only someone already hauled away most of the money, so all that’s left is some spare change.
Only Scalvo—seriously disappointed at the paltry heft of the heist—starts demanding that the mayor and the remaining officials hand over their wallets and jewelry, including Miccelli’s treasured bracelet. And that little dalliance puts them well past their 6:07 departure time.
And then the mask-less Scalvo (who, again, watched way too much Scarface) decides that maybe it’d be best to shoot everybody.
Well.
Only three people wind up getting shot: Scalvo, dead. The chief of police, dead. And Coppy gets hit in the shoulder
He and Rory stagger out of the facility, steal the armored car (which arrived, right on time, at 6:07) and thunder through Boston. They don’t have much of a haul, which’ll upset Mr. Besegai. They do have Mayor Micelli’s bracelet, which ticks off the pol. The two crooks have no money, no friends, Coppy’s bleeding bad and still won’t stop talking.
Easy, he said. Yeah, right.
Our two main characters, Rory and Coppy, have clearly made some poor life choices. But in some respects, they’re not so bad.
Rory is perhaps the most relatable of the two. He’s not interested in making a late-in-life career switch to crime: He wants to reconnect with his teen son. But he feels like he has too many debts on his ledger to make that reconnection. He needs $32,480 to make the necessary amends, and this seems like the only realistic avenue open to him. He won’t do the job for less, and he won’t accept more. And yeah, while taking the job was unquestionably wrong, there’s something to be said about reconnecting with your kid.
Coppy’s own checkered past comes with an asterisk. During another robbery, he was with a guy who was literally left holding the bag. That bag would’ve earned the guy eight-to-10 years in the slammer, thanks to his prior arrests. So he took the blame and was sent to the clink for three years.
We must introduce a third character to our little party: Not Scalvo (heavens, no, not in this section), but rather Rory’s conscientious psychiatrist, Dr. Donna Rivera. She clearly cares for Rory’s well-being—and she goes to some pretty outlandish lengths to keep him alive and shepherd him to a better place—mentally, emotionally and, at times, physically.
A character jokes about how he asked God for a more impressive bit of male anatomy. God (in the character’s story) told him, “Maybe next time.”
Outside that sexually-themed joke above, there’s not much sexual content to note—though we do hear that Rory’s divorced and that Coppy has developed a crush on Dr. Rivera.
After the three would-be robbers gather up wallets and jewelry from Mayor Miccelli and his inner circle, Scalvo—worried because they’ve seen his face—seems ready to shoot everyone in the room. The police chief also reaches for his gun, leading to a very brief shootout. Scalvo and the chief are killed: We see a small bullet wound in Scalvo’s forehead as he gets shot, though it’s suggested later that the aftermath was much worse. (“Was he a handsome guy?” someone asks Rory and Cobby. “I couldn’t tell with his head blown off.”) The chief’s body lies bloodied on the floor.
Those are the movie’s only two fatalities, believe it or not—though it’s not for lack of trying.
Besegai sends a friendly hit man to kill Cobby and Rory, but the two are saved by a serendipitously exploding house. (Characters get knocked down but not seriously injured.) A bar also blows up. Dozens of lawmen—including several snipers—fire into a Boston office building, leading to a lot of property damage but just one minor injury.
Cobby is shot, and he whines—quite regularly—that he’s on the verge of death. We see the wound a couple of times, and Rory convinces Dr. Rivera to remove the bullet. She’s a psychiatrist, sure, but she does remember plenty of her traditional medical training from her residency. “Honestly, gunshot wounds are my favorite,” she reassures Cobby. “I liked finding [the bullets].”
We see a couple of frenetic car chases and lots of unsafe driving. Cars and trucks and even tank-like vehicles take a beating, and airbags occasionally deploy. But it doesn’t seem like anyone gets seriously injured. Cobby and Rory take Dr. Rivera hostage—with her permission, of course. Dr. Rivera agrees to the plan, but only if Rory threatens to kill her if she doesn’t go along. (Rory weakly obliges.)
Someone smashes up a workplace. People are threatened. Guns are brandished. An armored truck guard fires off a couple of shotgun rounds. We hear a threat aimed at the removal of a critical piece of the male anatomy.
Near the beginning of the movie, Rory confesses to Dr. Rivera that he’s dealing with thoughts of suicide. He says that he has a plan in place: If things didn’t get better in a year (he told himself at the time), that he’d “cash in [his] ticket.” When Dr. Rivera asks how long ago he set that plan in motion, Rory confesses, “About a year ago.”
About 190 f-words, which is a lot. Also, more than 30 s-words and a smattering of other profanities, including “a–,” “h—,” “p—y,” and “pr–k.” We also hear a nasty anatomical slang reference or two. God’s name is misused 15 times (about half of them with the “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused more than a dozen times.
When we first meet Coppy, he’s forcing a kid to breathe into a breathalyzer attached to his motorcycle: The bike won’t start unless “Coppy” has been alcohol-free for 24 hours, and Coppy clearly has not been dry that long. Tellingly, when the motorcycle successfully starts, he heads straight to “his” bar. (When people, amazed, ask if he owns the establishment, he clarifies: Someone else owns it, “I just drink there.”)
Coppy drinks at that bar. Later, when he’s shot and asks Rory to find him something to drink, Rory digs up some warm light beer. (“I guess I’ll drink a case of warm beer and bleed out,” Coppy whines.) But eventually, he runs out of time to drink. And when Coppy unsuccessfully begs someone else to breathe into his breathalyzer, he soon realizes he didn’t need their help. (The film suggests this momentary spate of sobriety may become more common for Coppy.)
Other characters also drink. One takes swigs out of a flask during a moment of stress. Several law enforcement officials drink during a tense standoff (involving plenty of bristling weapons).
The Instigators is predicated on a heist. And even if that heist wasn’t particularly successful, the characters do steal. And they’re not done stealing: They swipe uniforms and abscond with a firetruck. Coppy hotwires a car (which, he jokes, he learned as part of his public-school curriculum). They plan other acts of thievery, too.
But the guy they’re stealing from, the mayor, is a far bigger thief. His re-election party is targeted in large part because of all the bribes and graft that’ll be flowing directly into his massive safe. Those ill-gotten goods, as well as Mayor Miccelli’s corrupt administration, become central to the plot. And so the movie ultimately turns our two bungling criminals into quasi-Robin Hood-like figures. Miccelli is the movie’s real villain, with his selfishness and casual disregard for life coming into sharper focus each moment he’s on screen.
There’s a reference or two to gambling, raw sewage and at least one racial slur.
In a way, The Instigators (now streaming on Apple TV+) feels a lot like the heist at its core.
On paper, it looks like it’d be a sure thing. It features Matt Damon and Casey Affleck—two Oscar winners who sport strong chemistry and don’t take themselves too seriously. Their supporting cast is strong. The screenplay can be pretty clever.
But ultimately, it bungles its positives away.
The biggest obvious culprit is, of course, its language. While it plays relatively nice in some of Plugged In’s other content sections (especially for an R-rated movie), The Instigators holds nothing back in terms of profanity. Like Scalvo, it seems to have taken all the wrong lessons from movies like Scarface, firing off f-words like they were loaded into an AK-47.
It strays elsewhere, too. And let’s not forget that our two heroes are, y’know, trying to steal a lot of money—and we’re supposed to like them for it.
In short, The Instigators, like most of its characters, could’ve been better.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
