Most heist movies depend on staying a step or two ahead of the audience from the start and remaining there until — at just the right moment — everything is suddenly allowed to click into place like the combination of a loaded jewel safe. We’re told almost every detail of Danny Ocean’s plan to rob the biggest casinos in Vegas, but that “almost” is enough to blindside us at the best possible moment. The first act of “Gambit” walks us through Harry Tristan Dean’s burglary of a priceless Chinese bust as if we’ll be tested on it later, but only so the film can pull the wool over our eyes by weaponizing that knowledge against it. Even the heist movies where the shit hits the fan and sticks to the ceiling (“Rififi” and “The League of Gentleman” come to mind) hinge on a sense that the characters are better at stealing things than anyone else is at stopping them.

For better or worse, Doug Liman’s “The Instigators” is not most heist movies. Flimsy in most respects but fun enough in its fumbling, “The Instigators” can’t stay a step or two ahead of the audience because its dumbass heroes — an unlikely pair of Bostonian deadbeats who bear an uncanny resemblance to of Danny Ocean’s crew — can’t put one foot in front of the other without tripping over themselves. These are not the guys a criminal mastermind calls when they want a job done right. These are the guys a third-rate hoodlum calls when nobody else will pick up the phone, and they only have a few days to prep for the score of a lifetime.

That’s the only reason why doltish ex-Marine Rory (Matt Damon) and drunken ex-con Cobby (Casey Affleck) find themselves boosting millions’ worth of dirty money from the mayor’s re-election night party at the behest of a desperate goon named Mr. Besegai. He’s played by a bushy and bristling Michael Stuhlbarg, whose every line is a screaming variation of “how could you fuck this up!?” But we already know the answer to that question, as “The Instigators” is only a few minutes old before things go immediately, amusingly, catastrophically wrong in a way that leaves Rory and Cobby scrambling through Boston with the city’s entire police department on their tails.

And so a good bad heist gives way to a bad good one, as these affable idiots try to steal themselves out of a city that’s closing in around them. Rory and Cobby are left without a clue, or a plan, or anything for us to hold onto beyond the faint suggestion that the characters and the actors playing them both deserve better, even if they all largely have themselves to blame (Affleck co-wrote the script with Chuck Maclean, while Damon co-produced the film with Casey’s older brother). The fact is that we spend most of this mid-energy misadventure waiting for the criminals to catch up with us, making “The Instigators” the rare heist movie that isn’t nearly convoluted enough to feel like it can get away with anything.

~this review continues on IndieWire~