Wild Horse Nine review: 'Malkovich and Rockwell are a joy to watch'
Starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as a pair of CIA agents stationed in Chile in the 1970s, Wild Horse Nine is Martin McDonagh’s best film since In Bruges, writes Alistair Harkness
Wild Horse Nine (15) ★★★★
A comedy about what happens when unspeakable things are spoken about out loud, Wild Horse Nine is Martin McDonagh’s funniest, snarkiest, most entertaining film since In Bruges. Echoing that movie’s subversive odd-couple dynamic, it stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as a pair of CIA agents who’ve been stationed in Chile in 1973 to destabilise the country’s nascent democracy after the election of socialist president Salvador Allende. We know this because Malkovich’s ageing hitman Chris Carlisle can’t stop gabbing about the plans for the imminent coup, egregiously dropping wink-wink hints (“Enjoy your president while you can”) to a pair of non-plussed female students (Mariana Di Girolamo and Ailín Salas) that he and Rockwell’s Lee Chesterfield meet en route to a vacation on Easter Island.
The trip is presented as a sort of last hurrah for Chris, who’s dying of cancer and has long wanted to see the giant sculptures he obnoxiously calls “the big heads” – although in his occasionally addled state he’s not quite sure if maybe he wouldn’t have preferred to go to Venice instead. Either way, Lee has been assigned to take him – in part because they’re also genuinely friends, in part because their boss MJ (an amusingly irritable Steve Buscemi) wants Lee to keep tabs on the indiscreet memoir Chris has been threatening to write. He also wants him to locate a piece of evidence related to the Kennedy assassination, something Chris may or may not have had a hand in and from which McDonagh wrings plenty of laughs before delivering a sobering punchline about the prominent role the CIA has played in ruining the world.
All of which is a gift for Malkovich and Rockwell and it’s a joy watching them tease out the existential dread in McDonagh’s precision-engineered jokes and verbal riffs. Malkovich’s mellifluous voice imbues lines detailing horrifying acts of violence with a resigned air of melancholy, one that grounds the comedy in something more real while simultaneously allowing him to go big when the film requires it. Rockwell is more of a straight man, but wonderful as Chris’s sympathetic handler whose loyalty to his friend is frequently put to the test, not only by Chris’s own eccentricities and paranoia, but also by the demands of the agency to which they’ve both devoted their lives for reasons that have long since stopped making sense. They may be terrible people, but Malkovich and Rockwell make them excellent company.
Wild Horse Nine is in cinemas from 4 November
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