The Instigators

A viral trailer came out June 13th for The Instigators, which reunites Matt Damon and Casey Affleck for a new action comedy. The storyline of this film gives us the Boston accents and therapy sessions of_ Good Will Hunting_ plus the high-stakes heists of Ocean’s Eleven and the car chase carnage of The Bourne Identity. It’s Matt Damon’s Greatest Hits! I know we all enjoy a good hit song synched to a good trailer, and this trailer by aspiring AppleTV+ gives us not one but two classic pop hits remixed together.

We start with a 5-second micro-teaser featuring big drum impact sounds synched to visual cuts of car chases and explosions. At 0:06 Rory (Matt Damon) is in a session with his therapist (Hong Chau), while a funky bass guitar begins to riff. The sound of a cymbal, played backwards, swells up then cuts to silence at 0:15, making space for Rory’s therapist to inadvertently prompt Rory to consider desperate measures - leading us to the armed robbery, which comes next in the plot.

At 0:18 Rory is walking through Boston’s iconic Fenway Park in winter to meet with some shady characters, when samples from Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 track “Gimme the Loot” kick in. The same bass guitar riff from earlier is now accompanied by turntable scratching, drums, and raps about robberies. Funky grooves have been used to underscore films about urban crime since at least 1971 when Isaac Hayes scored Shaft. So the music genre here is a logical fit for the scene from 0:21-0:55 where they are planning a heist.

This is an action comedy, which means we have a lot of dialogue in this trailer, and the music often breaks to leave space for punchlines. At 1:01, the music comes back in as Rory and team are entering a banquet hall kitchen to rob an event, and timed perfectly here we hear the rap “It’s a stickup, stickup.” In the course of the entire trailer we hear four different rap phrases from Notorious B.I.G., re-used over and over as samples to inject rhythmic energy and attitude into the trailer.

Now this is unusual for a trailer: at 1:13 we pivot to Steve Miller Band’s 1976 hit “Take the Money and Run,” which extends to 1:30. The chorus hook “Take the money and run” is heard from 1:14-1:17 at precisely the moment when the thieves find the safe, steal the money, and make their escape. Strong audio-visual synergy happening here! It’s on the nose, but it’s comedy, so it works.

At 1:17, with the heist over, the chase has begun; robbers being chased by cops and other villains. The trailer’s music shifts to the typical action genre here, with more big impacts from large cinematic drums as well as industrial rhythms that evoke the sounds of the smashing glass, guns, and helicopters that we are seeing on screen. To build intensity, from 1:24-1:28 the visuals are cutting to a new shot on every beat.

Turning the conventional car chase scene on its head, from 1:43-1:56 Rory is in a car chase that is also a therapy session, as we hear more rhymes from Notorious B.I.G. By this point Rory has proven clearly that he is not a robbery expert, so from 1:56-2:00 we hear the first half of the rap line “You’re talking to the robbery expert” repeated three times, with an explosion or car crash punctuating the end of the phrase each time. The musical hooks from “Take the Money and Run” and “Gimme the Loot” are brought back together at 2:11 to give one last big bang as the credits roll.

There are a lot of musical ingredients to this trailer, but they are used sparingly, and in an appropriate context each time, providing great flow and energy and supporting the comedy both in obvious and subtle ways. The Instigators comes out on AppleTV+ on August 9th.

— Jack Hui Litster