Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine” is a predictably bloody, spasmodically funny extended riff on a man-walks-into-a-bar joke. In this case, there are two men — C.I.A. agents — and the bar is Chile, 1973. The C.I.A. is about to help overthrow the country’s democratically elected government, but first these guys are going on a trip, seeing new places and maybe killing some people. There’s no punchline, per se, but the joke is on any viewer who has hopes that McDonagh, amid his customary chatter and splatter, would add more gristle to the gore.
Most of the movie takes place on Rapa Nui, more commonly known as Easter Island. It’s there that John Malkovich’s Chris and Sam Rockwell’s Lee check into adjacent hotel rooms. They’ve arrived from the Chilean capital, Santiago, where the C.I.A. bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), is marinating in his own bile. The coup is months away and while the movie is light on historical specifics, in 1970 President Nixon had ordered the agency to impede the inauguration of Chile’s newly elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Chris has a habit of blurting out hush-hush info about the operation, which he does to two young women — Mariana di Girolamo as Monica, Ailín Salas as Alicia — whom he and Lee meet en route.
Chris turns out to be gravely ill, which has helped loosen his grasp on reality. As the character’s purchase on it vacillates, Malkovich fills and empties Chris’s face of animating life, by turns drawing you near and putting you at a distance. The actor is a virtuoso of quicksilver tonal changes (and expressions), and he’s brilliant at creating an air of insinuating, destabilizing menace. He’s mesmerizing as Chris even when the character and story shift into an unconvincingly more serious register. McDonagh, though, aims to please, so first there’s talking and driving and sightseeing, including visits to the massive stone figures known as moai. The agents and the statues loom enigmatically over this land, an association that’s reinforced by their snazzy hats: pork pies for Chris, cowboy for Lee and disks for the statues.
There’s not much to the hats, though they help thicken the thin story. The moai certainly give the armchair tourists in the audience plenty to gawk at as Chris and Lee roam this beautiful, restricted locale, like other men in other McDonagh movies. In his feature debut, “In Bruges” (2008), two Irish hit men face a reckoning in the Belgian town of the movie’s title; in “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), set on a fictional Irish island in 1923 during the country’s civil war, two old friends have a falling out. Like those movies, “Wild Horse Nine” has visual luster, appealing performers who are clearly having a grand time with McDonagh’s chewy writing, music by Carter Burwell and animals that serve as symbols and sacrifices.
McDonagh peels away the layers in “Wild Horse Nine” (the island has feral horses) one teasing piece at a time. Malkovich’s Chris and Rockwell’s Lee emerge through their actions, but mostly through words that circle and pounce on the themes amid jokey bits, a few involving Chris’s freighted cognitive decline. This is Rockwell’s third movie with McDonagh, and he brings an easygoing lightness both to his character and the dialogue even at its most mannered. (Rockwell also starred in the 2010 Broadway production of McDonagh’s play “A Behanding in Spokane.”) Lee has an easy grin that often widens into laughter, and just enough American swagger to go with his cowboy hat and boots as well as, of course, his gun.
Once Chris and Lee settle in, McDonagh adds further complications and characters. The women from the airport re-emerge, mostly to look good, frown and righteously harrumph, and give this male-driven romp some character diversity. Parker Posey also puts in a few appearances as Lee’s wife, Marge, who calls from the States. None of these women make as strong a dent as the men, including Buscemi’s MJ. The movies love spies, but there’s not an iota of honor or nobility in this character, whom Buscemi plays like a terminally aggrieved bureaucrat. You sense years of fury, isolation and disappointment in MJ’s twitchy, angrily distorted grimaces; you can almost smell the malice wafting off him like old flop sweat.
The individual elements in “Wild Horse Nine” give the movie its kick, though not satisfying coherence. One issue is that McDonagh’s self-conscious cleverness and familiar posture of ironic detachment, however feigned, don’t fit with the grim history that he calls on. The ghosts of Vietnam, Cuba and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as those from a traumatic 1960s chapter in American history, are brought into the mix, mostly in what comes off as a progressively strained bid for gravitas. It doesn’t work. The real past presses down far too heavily here, which perhaps is why McDonagh’s leans on reliable people-pleasers like friendship, loyalty and redemption. It’s only when Malkovich flashes his malevolent smile, the smile which seduces and devours, that you see the movie that could, and should, have been.
Wild Horse Nine Rated R for adult language and gun violence. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters.
The post ‘Wild Horse Nine’ Review: A C.I.A. Holiday appeared first on New York Times.
