Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.True crime is everywhere: the stuff of more podcasts than there are podcast listeners. Truth in crime — the American crime movie, specifically — is rarer. But honesty ended up on-screen this year with Hit Man, director Richard Linklater playfully exposing the reality of hired assassins. Now we have The Instigators, a deadpan heist comedy aiming for a certain downbeat verité. The movie comes with a joke baked-in. The stars are Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who in the 2000s appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s movies, witty heist capers heavy on glitz. Two decades later, the new movie has been made on what looks a generous budget — but with all glamour long gone. Instead, the vibe is one of warm beer, bloodstains and pathos.Damon plays Rory, so wilfully grey-toned you assume he must be in hiding. (Another 2000s reference point: the director here is Doug Liman, who worked with Damon on The Bourne Identity.) In fact, he is pretty much exactly what he looks like: an average Joe pushing 60, weighed down by debt and family estrangements. A man of few words, Rory’s share of those is taken by Cobby (Affleck), a gabby ex-con. The setting is Boston, a fact of which the film is always keen to remind us. The score the two strangers get mixed up in will see a crooked city mayor relieved of a safe stuffed with pork-belly cash donations.If the movie nods back to the 2000s, it also wants to channel the spirit of early Seventies Hollywood, a time and place in which modest but deft US crime flicks hinged on everyman characters and wry, cynical scenarios. (Walter Matthau might well be involved.) Now Liman, Affleck and Damon move with confidence through the blunders and bad luck, settling into a relaxed groove of comic bickering. Even for actors with the long off-camera friendship of the stars here, making that kind of yakking tick is harder than it looks. Doubly so for Damon, who also has to fix our attention on a shrug of a character.Sometimes you even forget this is a pair of hugely successful movie actors in the guise of blue-collar losers. Off-camera, Damon along with Affleck’s older brother Ben have produced the film, which may explain why the characters are so scrupulously angelic for all their criminal bent. Among an underemployed supporting cast, Hong Chau does well with not much to work with. The real co-stars are the periodic explosions and car chases: the major campaign contributor here Apple, the filmmakers’ own stash of used banknotes.★★★☆☆On Apple TV+ from August 9
