British Irish enfant terrible Martin McDonagh already had a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and an Academy Award for Best Original Short on his mantle when he made his feature filmmaking debut with In Bruges in 2008. That mordant comedy about one Irish hit man taking another on a holiday to the Flemish city where he’s been instructed to kill his young accomplice remains McDonagh’s most universally embraced picture, buoyed by revelatory performances from Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, who instantly won back any goodwill he’d lost during his youthful fling with American stardom. It was also the first movie to realize that Ralph Fiennes, playing the dim crime boss who reluctantly orders Gleeson to rub out Farrell, could be fucking funny.
McDonagh’s new one, Wild Horse Nine, is even stronger, though it returns to the buddy killers dynamic of his debut. This time, the assassins are John Malkovich and McDonagh’s frequent collaborator Sam Rockwell, and their employer is not a South London hood but the CIA. It’s 1973, and they’ve been busy teeing up the right-wing coup that in a few months’ time—on Sept. 11 of that year, in point of fact—will depose Chile’s democratically elected Marxist President Salvador Allende and install brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose reign of U.S.-backed terror would span more than 15 years.
The Malkovich character, Chris, is in his 70s, and feeling the effects of what he hilariously ticks off as his successes—a lifetime of dirty deeds done ostensibly for the greater good. Rockwell’s Lee, the protege who has effectively become his mentor’s minder, takes Chris on a visit to Chile’s Easter Island to indulge his lifelong wish to “see the stone heads.” But failing health has loosened Chris’s tongue, particularly when he’s trying to impress the pair of Chilean students, played by Chilean actor Mariana di Girolamo and Argentine actor Ailín Salas, he and Lee keep bumping into. Rapa Nui is a tiny place. This, like his stubborn determination to write his memoir, is a problem, one for which Chris and Lee’s spymaster, MJ (Steve Buscemi, settling comfortably into his old-man era) is rapidly losing patience.
Ben Davis, the cinematographer who’s shot every McDonagh feature except In Bruges, makes stunning use of Rapa Nui’s majestic vistas to suggest the violence and terror Chris and Lee have helped propagate throughout the region are temporary maladies. Malkovich and Rockwell (who won an Academy Award for his performance in McDonagh’s divisive Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri nine years ago) are such natural vessels for McDonagh’s poetic and profane banter that the regret they’re both suppressing over their chosen path emerges only gradually. Parker Posey, who plays Lee’s estranged spouse, Margie, back in the States, flew to the location to perform her scenes with Rockwell, even though in the film they only speak by phone. Whether that’s commitment of the craft or commitment to studio-bankrolled travel, she’s a clear value-add to an already stacked cast.
It’s all a hilarious ride until a nightclub scene where the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara is performing, in which Chris calmly explains to his new friends why they should move away from their home country before September. He’s tickled that the ladies he’s been chasing say they met in a march for women’s equality. “Marches don’t change things,” the old spy tells them. “Shooting people changes things. Marches are just the places where we can get the cleanest photos of you without you knowing.”
All of McDonagh’s plays and films concern themselves with the question of whether people whose sins are grave and destructive can ever earn forgiveness. I’m convinced bad-faith readings of Three Billboards during the Woke 1.0 delirium of the first Trump administration are why that film was so loathed by so many. (That it scored a Best Picture nomination and a second win for Frances McDormand despite the widespread sense McDonagh was out of his depth trying to wrangle American racial tensions only fanned the flames.)
Coupling the reflections on the souls of killers from In Bruges with the pastoral interiority of The Banshees of Inisherin, Wild Horse Nine is both a canny corrective for McDonagh-heads whose faith was shaken and one of the strongest films of a very strong year.
“I fear the reviewers will complain that even his suicide note was shit,” Chris writes ruefully. Not a chance.
Wild Horse Nine (R, 118 mins.) opens Nov. 6.
