Wild Horse Nine

From Bruges to Inisherin to Easter Island. Not your typical Tripadvisor itinerary but the thematic leyline that connects Martin McDonagh’s loose triptych of Beckettian buddy movies. His latest could be the best yet: a bittersweet hangout film about lonely, crumpled men facing up to mortality, dealing with the consequences of violence and chewing the fat to outlandishly funny effect. 

That fat is mostly chewed by John Malkovich in a performance so good, you’re left rueing all the genre slop he’s had thrust his way in recent years. He’s Chris, a wolfish but ageing and increasingly forgetful CIA spook whose coup-organising and democracy-disrupting days may even have extended to supplying the rifle used to kill John F Kennedy 10 years earlier. His best (ie only) friend is Sam Rockwell’s Lee, a younger, slightly less jaded agent who nonetheless knows better than to trust a word their exasperated station chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), tells them.

It’s 1973, a few months before a CIA-orchestrated coup will bring down Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president Salvador Allende. This pair of loose cannons have been sent off to the remote Chilean territory of Easter Island to take in ‘the big heads’ and stay out of trouble. And it is not going well. ‘We came down here to destabilise your government,’ Chris happily tells a pair of students (Mariana di Girolamo, Ailin Salas) at the airport, ‘and it is going great’. Forget Slow Horses, these guys are basically stationary. 

But there’s another motivation for the trip that comes into sharper focus as they pass the time on Rapa Nui. And Chris’s decision to begin work on a tell-all memoir is causing a major stink with MJ, even if most of it, inexplicably, seems to be about dinosaurs. Almost as bad from the perspective of his employers, he’s also out sharing the coup plans with those lefty students. 

Forget Slow Horses, these guys are basically stationary

There’s more to all of this than meets the eye, of course, but McDonagh is a filmmaker who likes to keep his storytelling uncluttered (Seven Psychopaths aside) and these few moving parts and characters drive the story to its Chekhovian climax – along with brief telephone cameos from Tom Waits as Chris’s estranged brother and a fabulous Parker Posey as Lee’s garish, serially unfaithful wife back home. 

Instead, with Malkovich and Rockwell rinsing every zinger in the script for all its worth, a soulful Carter Burwell score and stunning Rapa Nui backdrops (the movie was shot on location there and in Santiago), he injects deeper melancholy into the goofy scenario. Wild Horse Nine is not exactly a companion piece to Costa-Gavras’ Chilean coup thriller Missing, although it certainly has some barbed and topical things to say about the dark history of American intervention around the world.

Instead, it becomes a film about a man examining the ledger of a life poorly led. With nods to The Searchers (Chris’s brother lives in Monument Valley) and soulful encounters with the island’s horses, it’s best read as an alt-western about an ageing gunslinger reaching the end of the line and finding nothing much more than a body count to his name. You might even shed a tear for these morally repugnant people; they’ll definitely make you laugh. Regime change shouldn’t be this entertaining. 

Wild Horse Nine premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s out in UK and Ireland cinemas Nov 4, and US theaters Nov 6.