Cold War paranoia meets Martin McDonagh’s darkly absurdist humor.
⭐⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 3.5 out of 4
Martin McDonagh wrote and directed this dark comedy set in Chile on the eve of the 1973 coup that ousted democratically elected President Salvador Allende and ushered in the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. That world-shaping Cold War event, along with the ouster and killing of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and the Kennedy assassination, looms large in this farcical take on power games and power dynamics. It may also just be McDonagh’s strongest work yet.
Anyone familiar with McDonagh knows his penchant for absurdist spins on the human condition. “Wild Horse Nine” stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as CIA agents sent to Santiago to help destabilize the Allende government. In texture and temperament, it’s closest to McDonagh’s “In Bruges” (2008), another near-surreal gem about men with guns and time to kill in a far-flung locale — you could argue it’s a loose remake.
Malkovich plays an operative, Chris, who has seen a lot. He was around Dallas when Kennedy was shot and in the Congo when Lumumba was deposed. How much he had to do with either is a running tease throughout. Rockwell’s second fiddle, Lee, is something of a cynical shaggy dog. He’s less seasoned than Chris, but seems every bit as lethal — if not more so. They’re Mutt and Jeff with death camps and executions as part of their everyday back-and-forths. At the Santiago airport, Chris, flirting with two young Chilean women, tells them matter-of-factly that he and Lee are there to toss out their president. The women don’t take him too seriously, but Lee gives Chris a quiet dressing-down.
Turns out Chris is terminally ill with cancer and the pair are flying off to Easter Island (a Chilean territory 2,100 miles away) because Chris wants to see the “big heads” before he exits. He’s also hopped up on morphine and recording his memoirs. Their higher up, MJ (Steve Buscemi) is none to keen about letting the CIA’s dirty secrets go public. MJ wants Lee to kill Chris and secure the tapes, but only after Lee locates “the rifle” Chris allegedly possesses. Meanwhile, Chris has already implored Lee to be his agent of death.
“Wild Horse Nine” is something of a road movie sans the road. Nearly all of the film takes place on the island, where the stone faces of the moai make a fine deadpan audience for two Americans who can’t stop talking. The women from the airport, Monica (Mariana Di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), turn up again, and Chris, after a career spent keeping secrets, can hardly wait to tell them more. The airport flirtation gives way to pricklier banter once the women start pushing back, though their spar over Rapa Nui versus Easter Island and indigeneity — great as it is — feels too much like 2026, not 1973. Back home in New Mexico, Lee’s wife, Marge (Parker Posey), dials in from time to time to tell him the house had been cased, broken into and worse. Posey is excellent and gets massive mileage out of the few phone calls, slicing through Lee’s mealy meanders with the practiced impatience of somebody who knows his routine.
Malkovich gives Chris the dry amusement of a man who’s already heard every argument against him and is curious to see if you can come up with a new one. Rockwell, usually good for a little showboating himself, does some of his best work here as a sounding board. You can see Lee doing the math every time Chris opens his mouth. The prospect of killing his partner puts a different spin on their banter once the cat is out of the bag. There’s also a wonderfully McDonagh wrinkle to Chris’s request. He’s Catholic enough to worry about suicide and resourceful enough to see if he can get around it by asking a friend to pull the trigger.
There are wild horses on the island — thus the title — and in one morphine-clouded conversation he’s near the gonzo edge, and McDonagh leans close, too. But there’s enough room around the wisecracks and different agendas to register the odd tenderness between these two men. They’ve had years to get good at killing and considerably less practice saying goodbye. That’s where the movie gets to you, somewhere between a last favor and one more lousy assignment.
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