Did ‘The Instigators’ Struggle to Steal Your Attention? Let the ‘70s Heist Film ‘The Hot Rock’ Feed Your Need for Criminal Shenanigans
Harrison Richlin
After a one-week theatrical window, Doug Liman’s recent reteaming with “Bourne Identity” collaborator Matt Damon, “The Instigators,” which was also co-written by and co-stars Casey Affleck, is set to debut on Apple TV+ this Friday, August 9. In addition to Damon and Affleck, the film also features performances from Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, Jack Harlow, Ron Perlman, Toby Jones, and Paul Walter Hauser, a cast that will no doubt earn at least a few streams despite middling to negative reviews, including IndieWire’s, which calls the film, “Flimsy in most respects but fun enough in its fumbling.”
No matter what you think of “The Instigators,” it is obvious the intention behind the film is to tell a heist story more focused on human flaw than it is on claiming any riches. Simply put, if you’re coming in expecting “Heat” or “Ocean’s 11,” expect to be disappointed. Instead, what “The Instigators” offers is a chance to spend time with phenomenal actors doing what they do best: Crafting characters and clashing them with others. What they’re stealing matters less than why they’re stealing it, not just because they fail time and again at following through on a plan, but because they continue to get back up anyway and keep going despite not even being sure at times of what they’re going after.
In interviews promoting the film, Liman and others are quick to use the ‘70s sports comedy “The Bad News Bears” as a reference point, pointing out that the characters in “The Instigators” are not even the B-team of thieves, but the C or D team. While this is an apt comparison and will help viewers prepare for a different type of crime story, there’s another film from the ‘70s more in line with the aims of “The Instigators” that’s also worth a viewing.
Following the smash hit success of his 1968 Steve McQueen thriller “Bullitt” and prior to the acclaim he’d receive for “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” and “Breaking Away,” British filmmaker Peter Yates applied his talents to an adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s humorous caper novel, “The Hot Rock.” William Goldman, who had recently received an Academy Award for his “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” screenplay, scripted the adaptation, which went on to feature frequent collaborator Robert Redford, as well as George Segal, Ron Leibman, and Zero Mostel. In the film, Redford appears as long-running literary character John Dortmunder, a career criminal just released from his latest stint in prison and ready to get back into the game.
His brother-in-law and partner-in-crime, Andy Kelp (Segal), has the perfect score for Dortmunder: The Sahara Stone, a priceless gem held in the Brooklyn Museum that was stolen from Africa during colonial times and has continued to be re-stolen by African nations and others ever since. The man who wants it now, a representative from Africa named Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn), views it as a personal mission to return the stone to his people. For Dortmunder and his team though, it’s just another gig, one that, despite careful planning and exhaustive costs put in, always seems to go south. This is where the first links between “The Instigators” and “The Hot Rock” start to form.
In “The Instigators,” like in “The Hot Rock,” we’re introduced to the main characters at a crossroads. For Rory (Damon) and Cobby (Affleck), they’re both unwanted sad-sacks who tried living life the right way only for it to bite them in the ass every chance it got. Now, they’re not so much ready to bite back as they are resigned to doing the wrong thing and hoping it’ll turn their luck around. Dortmunder, Kelp, and the rest of their team, however, are a different breed of criminal. For them, it’s about the fun of the game. Whereas Rory and Cobby land up shit’s creek following a botched heist because of poor planning, Dortmunder and his crew land there because no matter how hard you plan for something, you can’t account for human error.
According to “The Instigators” and “The Hot Rock,” what you can do in the face of glaring tactical mistakes is keep moving. For Rory and Cobby this means leveling up their wrong-doings at every turn, shifting what was supposed to be a big score into a huge, city-wide political crisis. Similarly, Dortmunder and Kelp must go from breaking into a museum to busting one of the gang out of state prison, then breaking into a police station, before ultimately having to figure out an elaborate scheme to gain access to a bank vault. Both sets of protagonists, despite being thrown into a world of chaos, somehow maintain their composure long enough to come up with pivot after pivot, making these films not about crimes being committed, but characters figuring their ways out of increasingly more complex situations of their own making.
Another factor of similarity between the two films is the types of side characters involved in complicating each circumstance the main characters are thrown into. In “The Instigators,” the pairing of Stuhlbarg and Molina as the schlemiel and schlimazel of criminal masterminds feels reflective of how “The Hot Rock” utilizes Mostel’s comic genius, as well as Gunn’s stern frustration. In the 1972 film, Mostel plays the nebbish-y father of one of the crew, a lawyer who sees an opportunity to swipe the stone from them and sell it to Dr. Amusa himself. While Stuhlbarg and Molina don’t get to play in as clever a sandbox, their characters — two not-so-wise wise-guys who operate out of a bakery — help to make sense of a world where everyone is out for themselves and how, when the world is like that, no one ends up on top.
The last, slightly tangential connection between “The Instigators” and “The Hot Rock” is how the politics around what is being stolen provides its own hindrance to the act of theft. In “The Instigators,” Rory and Cobby are trying to collect on the mayor’s (Perlman) secret stash of bribe money. While they fail to do so initially, their no-fucks-given attitude eventually lead them to sneaking into city hall, where the truth about the amount of money the mayor’s been holding onto is revealed. In the process of discovering this truth, however, the mayor extends all the resources at his disposal to stop his crimes from coming to light and to get the hell out of Dodge. “The Hot Rock” deals in politics less directly, but utilizes Dr. Amusa and the history behind the Sahara Stone to infuse a subtext of revenge for crimes against African culture. In both cases though, drawing out characters who act above the law they’re claiming to protect and work within gives further credence to the criminals just trying to do their job, get paid, and go home.
If there’s any definitive feature that separates the two films, it’s probably that “The Instigators” really wants you to be emotionally invested in its characters, whereas “The Hot Rock” just wants to take you on a fun ride. Rory and Cobby, though not fleshed out nearly as strongly as they could’ve been, are presented as real individuals with real problems who are so desperate, they’re willing to try and pull off a heist they themselves know has gaping issues. Dortmunder and co, on the other hand, while fun to watch and hang out with, are too obsessed with scheming and intricate planning to reveal any piece of the psyche underneath. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to be invested with the likes of Redford and Segal playing these characters and the same goes for Damon and Affleck. Both pairings elevate standard popcorn films to something actually worth studying, if not in relation to other crime films, then to similar character studies or even buddy comedies that aim to explore human nature more than they aim to weave a complex web.
