Now, that Robert Redford is gone, his understudy is definitely Brad Pitt. And you can sense George Clooney as the next Paul Newman. Beginning in the first Ocean’s movie back in 2001, they seem to have a wonderful chemistry that Newman and Redford showed off in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and later The Sting.
Wolfs is the type of movie that would crumble without the two of them in the leads as two high-profile fixers who both work alone and don’t even let anyone know their name and ego, neither do we. They are both called to show up at a luxurious hotel room occupied by Margaret (Amy Ryan) who is a worker at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office seeking election. Margaret has invited a young man (Austin Abrams) she just met only referred to as Kid to her room. But he got high on drugs and crashed through a glass drink cart by jumping on the bed before they could have sex.
Margaret thinks he’s dead and calls Clooney’s character but Pitt’s character also shows up as he’s been informed of the hotel’s proprietor of what happened. They argue about working together but feel it’ll be a simple body disposal as they instruct Margaret to go home. Unfortunately, the kid isn’t dead as they discover after he’s been loaded into the trunk of the car.
Also, the kid has a few kilos of drugs on him that he offered to deliver to help out a college classmate. So, now the three go through the New York underworld over the course of a night sometime in December before Christmastime. Written and directed by Jon Watts, he manages to show how the two actors now in their 60s still got it. The back and forth banter only works if it’s delivered so well. And Abrams is a nice addition especially during a scene where he delivers a manic monologue about how he got in the situation.
And you can’t beat a neat cameo by the ever reliable Richard Kind as the kid’s father. Also, not to give too much away, there’s another hint of Butch and Sundance that fans of that movie will recognize.
The Instigators, on the other end, pairs Matt Damon and Casey Affleck together as two Bostonian-area lowlifes in desperate need of money. Damon is Rory, a Marine vet, who needs about $32,000 so he can pay some bills (child support and legal fees) so he can visit his son. Affleck, who seems to be hellbent on one-upping Mark Wahlberg as the most-Boston Bostonian as Cobby Murphy has a scraggly beard and unkempt hair and unwashed clothes as he hangs around in a dive bar after just being released from prison.
As a matter of fact, how come the blue collar people in the Boston area in these movies always look like they need a good shower and shave? Since the events surround the Boston mayoral election, it’s set during the colder months so everyone looks even more scuzzy in this flick. Cobby and Rory have been organized by low-level mobsters Besegai (Michael Stuhlberg) and Dechico (Alfred Molina) to rob a vault as the corrupt Boston Mayor Miccelli (Ron Perlman) has been taken bribes left and right even for people to attend his watch party at a high-scale hotel. It’s believed he should have about $300,000.
Of course, if you’ve seen any movie like this, you know exactly what is going to happen. Affleck is credited as a co-writer and Doug Liman is the director. Things don’t go as planned during this heist as Miccelli has lost the election and refusing to concede. the money is also not there as they’ve already made two armored truck pick-ups. And they can’t get out of the hotel as quickly without running into Miccelli and the police chief.
Rory and Cobby find themselves on the run from the mob and the police over the course of a day. Unfortunately, Affleck and Damon don’t have the best chemistry together which is odd considering they grew up together. Damon feels like he doesn’t want to be in the movie and is just doing this movie as a favor to Liman who directed him in the Bourne movies and Affleck. Enter Hong Chau as Dr. Donna Rivera, Rory’s psychiatrist, who becomes the third person in this caper as a hostage to secure the safety of Rory and Cobby.
The problem with Instigators is there’s too much yelling and screaming and bickering and arguing. Heist movies are never really about the actual heist but for every Reservoir Dogs or even Ocean’s Eleven, there are countless imitators that fall apart. I seriously doubt even in Boston, a mayor like Millicelli, would exist especially when it looks like he beats an aide to death and we’re suppose to think it’s funny. Stuhlberg and Molina are two great actors but they are underused so much here.
So is Ving Rhames as a supposed corrupt Boston cop. Paul Walter Hauser pops up in a few scenes as a fixer himself. There’s even a Tarantino-esque scene where Rory and Cobby take off in a stolen armored vehicle then debate a few blocks away for too long on whether there is another guard in the back. As if every Boston-area cop wouldn’t have set up a perimeter and tracked them down by this time.
I feel Affleck might have written this script back in the late 1990s when Miramax and the Weinstein Brothers were going goo-goo over the script Damon wrote with his brother, Ben. But then he say the difficulties that happened with The Boondock Saints and threw it in a drawer. Then after he won an Oscar in 2017 , he pulled it out and dusted it off and used his win as leverage to get it made.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 