Seeing Matt Damon Paired With Casey Affleck Is So Disorienting

Photo: Apple TV+

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, sons of Boston (adjacent), have had Hollywood’s most famous best bro-ship since their breakthrough Good Will Hunting, a movie in which they, not coincidentally, played best bros. Their bond that has weathered career ups and downs and various high-profile relationships as well as, more recently, homoerotic fan cams and monetization by way of Dunkin’ commercials. They sometimes seem like two halves of a single movie star, with Damon versatile and smart and generally much better onscreen than in public, and Affleck an incredible if reluctant tabloid fixture who’s never entirely figured out his acting career — a duality that means it’s always a little disorienting when the younger Affleck, Casey, gets thrown in the mix. Casey looks and sounds enough like Ben to feel like late-season recasting when paired with Damon, but while he’s a better actor with a worse behind-the-scenes record, he’s also meaner and sharper, capable of coming across as an actual dirtbag. When he and Damon played hiking buddies who get lost in the desert in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, it made sense that the film ended with one of them strangling the other out of both mercy and exasperation. And in The Instigators, Casey and Damon’s characters, even when they begrudgingly arrive at an understanding, genuinely want nothing to do with one another.

This dynamic is disastrous for what’s meant to be a romp of a buddy picture, but it’s also kind of interesting. Casey Affleck wrote the screenplay for The Instigators with Chuck MacLean (Doug Liman directs), and while there’s no reason to believe his part was ever intended for anyone else, the film nevertheless plays like an indirect comment on the Matt and Ben Show. As Rory, a depressive former Marine who embarks on his first venture into the wrong side of the law in order to pay off child support and other debts from his defunct marriage, Damon feels like he’s waiting for the arrival of a more familiar screen partner who doesn’t ever show up. This other Affleck doesn’t lob the ball back to his co-star so much as spike it every time. As alcoholic ex-con Cobby, Casey fires off a stream of insults and complaints that not even a bullet wound can put a stop to, intermittently punctuated by a “fuck your mother.” It’s a role that plays into Affleck’s defeated aura and wiseass edge — Cobby is basically doing color commentary on his own life, as though he isn’t an active participant in his own bad decisions. If Damon is lost as Rory, whose suicidal ideation is primarily expressed by way of low energy, that’s in part because Affleck doesn’t really need a scene partner. He seems ready and willing to carry the movie on his own.

Despite this, The Instigators does have a stacked cast. Hong Chau gamely plays straight woman to the two lead doofuses as Dr. Donna Rivera, Rory’s psychiatrist, who’s roped into their mess when what was supposed to be a straightforward robbery of the mayor’s election-night party goes wrong. As that mayor, a corrupt incumbent named Miccelli, Ron Perlman looks like he could be in Dick Tracy without any prosthetics, while Toby Jones is enjoyable as his squirrelly lawyer. Michael Stuhlbarg is arguably having the best time of anyone, hollering and wearing a fur coat as a local gangster, with Alfred Molina playing his bakery-owning partner. But Ving Rhames, as a tank-driving member of the BPD’s Special Operations Unit, and Paul Walter Hauser, as a chain-wearing would-be tough, give him a run for the money. (Jack Harlow is also around for some reason.) This ensemble would, in the hands of another director, feel like an abundance of riches, but Liman opts to give The Instigators a grubby, underdone style that dulls a lot of the supporting cast’s colorful work. He shoots the film as if unaware of the moments that are meant to be funny, and has no rhythm for the bickering dialogue. When Donna agrees to be held hostage by a desperate Rory in order to treat Cobby’s gunshot wound, it plays like a stressed-out discussion of professional ethics rather than the madcap sequence it’s meant to be.

That complaint could be leveled at the inciting incident, too, a stickup attempt to snatch Miccelli’s kickbacks that ends with Rory and Cobby on the run. Liman mangles the escalation from disaster to disaster, but the sequence at least preps us for how many Boston gags to expect going forward. The references come fast and frequent, from Cobby claiming that hot-wiring cars is a mandatory extracurricular in Quincy to quips about trigger-happy security guards having failed their Statie tests to the universally agreed-upon view that Montreal, a place no one has been to, is where you go when you have to flee town for good. More than anything, The Instigators is ethnic comedy if being a white guy from Boston counts as its own ethnicity, an argument that Damon and the Afflecks have spent a good portion of their careers making. Those local specifics and in-jokes may not amount to much, but they are what distinguishes this film from other half-baked crime movies. Would it be better if Ben was in it? Probably not, but it’d be what’d you expect, the latest installment in their self-mythologized friendship, instead of a mess that’s at war with itself for most of its run time.