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Apart from being a fine source of blarney and beans, the city of Boston also has a long history of Irish criminal enterprise, spattered with names like Spike O'Toole and Punchy McLaughlin and spiked with the homicidal doings of the late lunatic Whitey Bulger. This violent underworld has been a rich source of material for the movies -- for pictures like Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" and Ben Affleck's "Gone Baby Gone" and "The Town" (the first two films Affleck directed).

Now Casey Affleck, Ben's younger brother, is starring in a new Boston crime flick called "The Instigators," along with Ben's longtime collaborator Matt Damon. The director is Doug Liman, who once directed Damon in "The Bourne Identity."

One of the benefits of this cinematic regrouping is that the actors are so intimately connected: Damon and Casey Affleck both have roots in the Boston area, so their command of the local accent is irreproachable, and both are quietly charismatic performers.

In the movie, Damon plays an ex-Marine named Rory, a sad-sack loser with a dead marriage and an alienated son weighing on his conscience and a mountain of debt that would be crushing his dreams if he still had any. Rory also has a psychotherapist named Donna Rivera (Hong Chau) who worries that her miserable patient is headed toward suicide.

The last thing Rory needs at this point is an influx of other losers in his orbit. But suddenly, there they are -- a crew of dimwit lowlifes recruited by a schemer named Besegai (Michael Stuhlbarg), who's planning a smash-and-grab on a reelection fundraiser for the crooked Mayor Miccelli (Ron Perlman). It is for this caper that Besegai has sought out Rory -- a man with no criminal experience, who wants only to clear exactly $32,488 from the operation to make all his troubles disappear -- as well as an annoying ex-con called Cobby (Affleck) and a more successful ruffian named Scalvo (Jack Harlow).

This is a crew that would be of only minimal assistance in knocking over a children's lemonade stand, so it's no surprise that things start going wrong almost immediately. An inscrutable fed named Toomey (Ving Rhames) turns up to annoy everybody, and there's an oddball under-thug called Booch (Paul Walter Hauser), and a sack in a safe that contains a big stack of ... one-dollar bills. And as the story flows along on a cushion of pretty good gags (Casey Affleck cowrote the script), director Liman summons up the action skills he's honed in films like "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and the recent "Road House" remake. And he's really good at this stuff. CGI was surely employed in blowing up a couple of buildings, but the crash-kaboom automotive carnage that enlivens the second half of the picture has the feeling of old-school practical effects. (To the extent that it may be digital, it's top-notch work.)

Damon and Affleck are perfectly paired comic foils. At one point, attempting to finesse his way out of a very tight spot, Rory asks his therapist what she thinks of a bright idea he's just come up with. "What if I took you hostage?" he says. "I mean with your permission?" Listening nearby, and not believing what he's just heard, Cobby can only sigh. "What the fuck kind of conversation is this?" he says.

("The Instigators" is in theaters now and will start streaming on Apple TV+ on Aug. 9.)

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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