When Dumb Really Works: The Case For 'The Instigators'
#284: "The Instigators," "It Ends With Us," "Thief," "Industry" S3
Edition 284:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Matt Damon and Casey Affleck star in an Apple heist comedy whose dumb charm really worked on me. It was hard for me to extend the same grace to It Ends With Us, the biggest movie of the week. But I finally got around to one of the granddaddies of the heist genre, and we can all celebrate the new season of a massively overlooked HBO show. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” our first pure Oscar bait of the year.
The Instigators
I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink in the past six years, and especially over the past few weeks, complaining about what I’ve seen as the empty calories and diversionary garbage that has wrestled a stranglehold over the weekly box office. It can often feel like these big releases are intent on returning us viewers to the perpetual mental state of a 12 year old.
Then along comes The Instigators, a movie every bit as stupid and superficial as any of those others but this time targeting my specific sensibilities, and I’m forced to confront personal bias. As much as I said last week that I’m not and will never be a M. Night Shyamalan guy, Doug Liman is a filmmaker whose style and general vibe I have always clicked with (Swingers, Edge of Tomorrow, Mr. and Mrs. Smith). With him at the helm of a heist comedy starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, it’s little surprise that I really really enjoyed this.
These kind of 1980s and 90s-toned premises are quickly becoming a signature for Artists Equity, the pseudo-studio run by Damon and Ben Affleck. Given that old school mentality, it’s a true sign of the times that the company’s first two major releases went straight to streaming with Amazon Prime (Air) and Apple, companies who will still cut big checks for projects that no longer succeed at the box office.
My consistent complaint about Apple’s shows and movies is that they all look and feel so much like people playing dress-up. All the big budgets in the world can’t buy authenticity, from the costumes to the production design to the A++ movie stars, who come off somewhat mismatched to their C+ material.
There’s little reason to expect more than that from this low concept premise, which basically boils down to two losers in Boston who attempt a robbery of the city’s mayor but quickly prove to have no skill or instinct for it at all and have to go on the run. Damon and Affleck have the kind of chemistry that can only be explained by 40+ years of real life friendship, and each of them seems to relish the chance to play wise-cracking dumbasses.
For all its crime façade — boosted greatly by the wild, Apple-funded supporting cast of Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jack Harlow, Alfred Molina, Toby Jones and Ron Pearlman — this movie is at its core just a bumbling buffoon buddy comedy.
I’m as surprised as anyone that the jokes pretty much all landed for me, and I laughed my way through the crisp 1hr41min runtime. The way it pokes fun at the growing prevalence of “therapy speak,” and the fact that every citizen of Boston fully believes they are the main character of their own movie at any given time, really worked for me.
Obviously results may vary on your end, but I do think the earnestness of the comedy stands out in our era of meta winking irony.
Time after time in this newsletter I talk about movies that spend the first two-thirds of their runtime not taking themselves seriously, winking at the audience for how ridiculous they are, and then expecting audiences to suddenly take them seriously when they hard pivot to serious stakes in the final third.
This movie corrects both of those errors. First, it doesn’t wink even slightly to the audience. It’s ridiculous, absolutely, and explicitly trying to be funny, but the characters in the story never break kayfabe. Second, the movie doesn’t make any attempt to convince us that its rollicking action comedy is going to become a poignant emotional or world-changing drama in its third act.
Instead, it takes a page out of the Burn After Reading final scene playbook. “’What did we learn, Palmer?’ ‘I don’t know sir.’ ‘I don’t f—n know either.’” Translation: that was a fun way to waste two hours, wasn’t it?
I’m not going to say that solution will work for every movie, and if it were widely adopted it would probably lose its charm quickly, but it’s currently the most intellectually honest way to wrap up a dumb movie, so long as you can do it cleverly. And this one really does.
Something New
It Ends With Us (Theaters): This is not the place to come for a discussion on best-selling author Colleen Hoover’s mix of 50 Shades of Gray-style female titillation with serious themes like domestic violence to sell a bajillion paperbacks. All I’m going to say is that this movie is basically about a woman’s quest to break the cycle of abuse by making the difficult choice to leave one impossibly hot and successful man who deeply loves her for another impossibly hot and successful man who deeply loves her. Ugh so hard!!
I did think it was a pretty regrettable decision to have this movie be directed by a man…especially one who casts himself as the wife-beating villain of this romantic drama. Intentionally or not, he portrays himself favorably to the point of confusing the story’s message, and not in a fun, gray-area-of-life sort of way. It’s pretty cookie cutter melodrama, and almost all of the fun energy injected into the stiff structure comes via Jenny Slate, the prototypical perfect rom-com best friend who is just funny, crazy and heartfelt enough to make the movie watchable.
It’s hard not to be cynical about the movie’s huge success at the box office (approaching $100 million globally) coming from a combination of 1) piggy-backing on the Deadpool & Wolverine press tour, 2) Taylor Swift directing her army of Swifties to support her friend Blake Lively, the movie’s star. Lively is a great example of how important these press tours are to stardom, considering a quick poll of my friends this week resulted in everyone knowing who she was and saying they liked her but none being able to remember a single movie she’d been in previously (and no, “Gossip Girl” doesn’t count).
The financial success only means we’re going to see more Hoover adaptations on the big screen in our future, which I can only imagine means plenty of more sexy people with daddy issues.
Something Old
Thief (1981, Roku, Tubi, Pluto): This is one of those skeleton key classics, where after you watch it you suddenly understand the dozen-plus movies released after it you’ve seen that have been directly ripping it off. Michael Mann directs this, the granddaddy of the modern heist film, starring James Caan (Sonny from The Godfather) as a safecracker in Chicago who essentially sells his soul to the devil, in the form of an underworld crime boss, then realizes he cannot buy it back after the big score.
It basically writes the blueprint for the tropes and storytelling tricks that every heist movie has had since, paired with Mann’s expertise in ambitious, obsessive protagonists. Caan gives an awesome performance as basically a bull charging ahead thinking he can run through every obstacle through sheer force of will. His partner in crime is Jim Belushi, who only gets a few well-placed moments of comedy, Willie Nelson plays a part as Caan’s incarcerated mentor, and Robert Prosky plays one of the sneakiest villains this genre has ever produced. Man, this movie is so well-made. Highly recommend.
Something to Stream
Industry S3 (Max): The first season of HBO’s “Industry” was an example of first-time show runners operating with no guardrails. It’s wild, chaotic and oftentimes brilliant in its portrayal of the wild lives of young workers at a financial firm in London. All that juice (or in this case, cocaine) got wrestled into a more traditional structure for season two, coming together for what I think was one of the more underrated seasons of TV in the past decade. I loved it.
In the two years since, several members of the cast have become burgeoning stars (Myha'la in Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Marisa Abela in Back to Black, Harry Lawtey in The Pale Blue Eye), and HBO decided to give the show its coveted Sunday night slot and beef up its cast with the introduction of Kit Harrington (Jon Snow!) as a crazy billionaire. I don’t know that you’d need to see seasons one and two to appreciate the great pilot for the third season, which aired on Sunday, but I am using this space to recommend that you do go back and give this show a crack from the beginning.
Trailer Watch: Lee
As soon as the Oscars wraps each year, we start to see lists of potential Best Picture favorites for the following year. They’re often wildly wrong, as it’s impossible to predict which films will climb aboard the hype train and which will not, but consistent across every shortlist over the past year is this biopic of the war photographer Lee Miller.
It’s in many ways really classic Oscars bait — movie star (Kate Winslet) in a World War II drama portraying a prominent historical figure. But I guess we’re going to find out whether the new Academy voting body can still fall for a stodgy prestige play, and whether a year can support two separate movies about war correspondent photographers (the other being Civil War).