The Instigators review - 'easy, breezy late-summer movie fun'

The Instigators

The Instigators (15) ★★★★

Trap (15) ★★

Only the River Flows (15) ★★★

Matt Damon reunites with director Doug Liman for the first time since The Bourne Identity in The Instigators, a knock-around heist caper with little more on its mind than providing some easy, breezy late-summer movie fun. Co-starring and co-written by Casey Affleck, the film casts Damon as Rory, a hangdog combat veteran who’s given himself a year to sort his life out but is fast approaching his self-imposed deadline to fix things so he can see his estranged son. Up to his eyeballs in back-dated child support payments, and being treated for depression by a military appointed psychiatrist (played by Hong Chau), his desperately misguided last shot at redemption is to source the $32,480 he needs by agreeing to help rob Boston’s corrupt mayor of a vast slush fund on the night of his re-election (the mayor is played with Trumpian ruthlessness by Ron Perlman). Roped in by his cousin, whose own screw-up has left his blow-hard bosses (Michael Stuhlbarg and Alfred Molina) short of a crew, Rory finds himself paired up and on the run with sulky ex-con Cobby (Affleck) when the election doesn’t go to plan and the job inevitably goes wrong. 

Though you know what you’re going to get with a movie like this, the fun comes from the charisma and craft the cast and crew bring to bear on proceedings. Where Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy (which also starred Damon and Affleck) got by on the finger-popping pizazz of its Vegas setting, The Instigators sees Liman embrace the film’s wintry, blue-collar Boston milieu for a gutter-dwelling tale of likeable screw-ups taking on a system where top-down corruption doesn’t inspire a lot of hope in the little guy that it’s possible to improve your lot legitimately.

The heist itself is pretty funny, with Liman pulling mock-Michael Mann moves to ironically offset the characters’ general incompetence, and Damon subtly letting his character’s neuroses come to the fore. Liman also stages his best car chase since Bourne, albeit this time playing the mayhem for laughs by soundtracking it to Petula Clark’s Downtown and turning it into a three-way therapy session between his bickering leads and Chau’s Dr Rivera, who pretends to be Rory’s hostage so she can prevent him being shot by the mayor’s on-the-take police force. The whole thing plays like a pleasing throwback to mismatched buddy movies like Midnight Run, with a supporting cast that includes Ving Rhames, Toby Jones and Paul Walter Hauser adding to the along-for-the-ride vibes.

Hitchcock used to dismiss critics who got too hung up on the believability of plot details with the withering nickname “the plausibles”. Fair enough, but Hitchcock never had to sit through a bad M Night Shyamalan movie. His latest, Trap, sees the once-exciting director yet again promise more than he can deliver with an entertainingly preposterous high-concept plot that turns out to have all the structural resilience of a soufflé. 

It revolves around a serial killer (played by Josh Hartnett) who realises the pop concert he’s attending with his teenage daughter is really an FBI sting operation designed to catch him. Which is kind of a fun idea. Sadly, from the incongruous staging of a big arena show during the daytime, to the way every obstacle its charming antagonist encounters is easily overcome by some dolt giving him all the information he needs, almost nothing about the setting rings true - and that includes Shyamalan casting his own daughter Saleka (an actual recording artist) as a sub-Taylor Swift/Ariana Grande superstar called Lady Raven. 

Josh Hartnett in Trap (Warner Bros)

To be fair, Hartnett does at least seem to know he’s in a stupid film judging from his slightly goofy performance as a serial-killing dad trying to maintain a healthy life/work balance. Yet the stupidity gets amplified by the second half’s need to start filling in his character’s psychological backstory with big info dumps that do none of the things a suspense movie should do, chief among them being: provide suspense. There’s no real twist to speak of either, just a series of increasingly implausible events. 

There’s more serial killing action in Only the River Flows, though this slow-burning 90s-set drama couldn’t be more different. Set in provincial China, it’s a film so attuned to film noir heritage that director Shujun Wei opts to set part of it in an old cinema - a sly tribute, perhaps, to the murky crime stories of old he’s trying to evoke.

Only the River Flows | Contributed

Relentlessly downbeat, it follows Ma Zhe (Yilong Zhu), the lead detective in the local police force’s criminal investigations unit, which has recently taken over the aforementioned movie theatre to use as a base of operations to tackle spate of brutal killings. The case has an obvious suspect, a mentally disabled homeless man known locally as “Madman”, but Ma Zhe isn’t convinced of his guilt and becomes distracted by other leads, including a local man who confesses to the crime and a mysterious audio recording of a woman leaving cryptic messages for her lover.

What follows isn’t really a procedural; it’s more of a cryptic puzzle in which we witness the gradual unravelling of our protagonist as his obsession with the case blends with his own shame and guilt regarding the baby he and is wife are expecting. The end result is very atmospheric - and Wei really goes to town with the analogue period details - but it’s also so opaque it’s difficult to get a handle on what it’s trying to say. 

The Instigators is in selected cinemas and available to stream on AppleTV+ now; Trap is in cinemas now; Only the River Flows is in cinemas from 16 August