Doug Liman’s heist gone bad film The Instigators (2024) is an alright buddy movie that spices up machine-gun dialogue with a smattering of over the top of action. Written by Chuck MacLea and Casey Affleck, I came away wondering if criminality is a consequence of, or integral to, this thing we call capitalism?
The film’s closing song, Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman, acts as a parenthesis to the previous hundred minutes, and urges you to think of the titular instigators as revolutionaries. “Call out the instigators, Because there’s something in the air, We’ve got to get together sooner or later, Because the revolution’s here” was written in 1969 by John Keen, and produced by Pete Townsend of The Who.
Apparently the song reflects the social and political upheavals that dominated the late nineteen-sixties. Certainly the generation born just after the Second World War, boomers, were coming of age during the latter half of that decade, and their youthful rejection of old values was “in the air”. But to these ears Something in the Air sounds more like whimsical self-aggrandising than a revolutionary call to arms. The forces created by that generation’s explosive push for equality and individual freedoms, crashed against their complete abdication of responsibility (it’s baked into their mantra “tune in, turn on, drop out”) and ceded whatever gains they made to the reactionary forces they railed against. Their revolution did little more than turn YIPPIES into YUPPIES and set us on track for fifty or more years of neoliberalism.
That realisation has me wondering, when Thunderclap Newman calls out the instigators “Because the revolution’s here” who did they expect to come running? The popular imagination frames sixties radicals as an organised army of firebrands ready to change the world. The reality was a little less romantic. If you’ve “got to get together sooner or later” you’re a disorganised rabble, and a disorganised revolution is little more than a riot, and as we saw recently around the United Kingdom, riots get suppressed, violently. Boomers, for all their talk of change, didn’t have the stomach for that kind of revolutionary violence. Most people don’t. You know who does? Criminals.
Criminals, by definition, reject the laws the rest of us are coerced into obeying. They’re not cowed by state-sanctioned violence that keeps us in our place. Calling out the instigators, is calling on criminals to start trouble, to start a revolution. The thing is, I don’t think the criminal class are that politically motivated. In fact, I’d argue, criminality is more of a manifestation, a distorted reflection, of the self-interest that underpin the wider society. You could say, criminals are just capitalists who got caught.
It should also be understood, authority routinely criminalises once acceptable behaviours to counter “revolutionary” change. Just Stop Oil protester Roger Hallam was recently sent to prison for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. He got four years for planning to cause an inconvenience to the wider economy. That’s not the same as rejecting law and order, that’s society shifting the goalposts to win an argument.
Liman’s instigators are two screw-up children of the peace generation, ex-marine Rory (Matt Damon) and ex-convict Cobby (Casey Affleck). Both men have issues, their lives a byproduct of the post-boomer, neoliberal, malaise. Rory is in therapy, presumably to treat the traumas suffered during his time in the military, but it could just as easily be his life. Like so many men of his generation, society makes him feel like a failure. Unable to pay what he owes in child support, he’s too embarrassed to face his son. Cobby is a different kind of failure. He has nothing to his name but a smart-bike and a motor-mouth. He did time to protect his junkie brother, taking the blame for his brother’s crime, so he wouldn’t face a third conviction. Habitual offender laws in the United States mean Cobby’s brother would’ve been lamped with a really long sentence.
The instigators are set to work by a local mob boss (Michael Stuhlbarg). He wants Scalvo (Jack Harlow), Rory and Cobby to rob the incumbent mayor’s election campaign. He has insider information that corrupt Mayor Miccelli (Ron Perlman) collects cash, millions in donations, for a seat at his table. The plan is to sneak into the convention centre and empty the safe of Miccelli’s money. They expect to find a safe stuffed with envelopes of untraceable cash, instead they find it empty.
That failure conspires with the crew’s incompetence to get them lost in the conference centre. Wandering the halls they stumble on the Mayor and his cronies, so Scalvo decides “they need to leave with something” and tries to rob the Mayor. In the shootout that follows the Police Chief and Scalvo are killed, and Cobby is wounded.
Fleeing that scene with little more than trinkets (including a bracelet engraved with the combination of the Mayor’s City Hall safe) Rory and Cobby are on the run, chased not only by the entire police force but also by the Mayor’s enforcer Frank Toomey (Ving Rhames). As if that wasn’t bad enough, when their boss hears about the murder of the Chief, he sends someone to silence them.
Rory and Cobby aren’t bad people, they’re just playing a shitty hand, a hand that has them running from one bad choice to the next, until Toomey corners them in a bar and retrieves the Mayor’s bracelet. Escaping that corner is explosive, but rather than doing the sensible thing and fleeing north to Canada, they decide to actually rob the Mayor, by sneaking into the City Hall. Cobby has memorised the numbers on the bracelet, and quickly gets them into his safe. When they’re discovered every gun in the city is fired at them. To escape the shooting gallery they Robin Hood the cash, push the safe out of the window, and let the assembled mob get rich quick.
When the pair are finally arrested they have with them two hard-drives, from the Miccelli’s safe, containing details of his secret off-shore accounts. The hard-drives are a get out of jail free card, because when the new Mayor is given a choice, charge Rory and Cobby and have the drives submitted into evidence, or release the instigators and take over the accounts, one corrupt Mayor is replaced with another, and the boys are set free.
It’s hard not to feel weary, even betrayed, by the truth of the instigator’s world, and how it’s organised. Nothing really matters. All you do is survive. The law won’t protect you against the lawless because in this world’s twisted morality, criminals are the least hypocritical players. At least they’re honest about being criminals. As I said earlier, criminals are just the one’s who get caught. The moral I take from that is simple, don’t get caught.
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