Review: 'Wild Horse Nine' is a funny and deeply cynical take on '70s CIA agents, enlivened by John Malkovich's battered lead character
If there’s a sure indicator how flawed the Academy Awards are as an accurate measure of movie greatness, it’s not that John Malkovich doesn’t have one yet — it’s that he hasn’t been nominated for one in 32 years. According to all indications, Malkovich’s battered, acid-tongued performance in the pitch-dark comedy “Wild Horse Nine” may fix the second item, and potentially the first.
Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play Chris and Lee, two grizzled CIA agents visiting Chile in 1973 — right around the time the U.S. helped engineer the military coup that overthrew the elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and installed the brutal dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Chris and Lee have worked together a long time, and talk like a bickering married couple about what each finds annoying about the other.
What annoys Chris about Lee is that he’s constantly eating, or nagging him. What Chris does that annoys Lee is a habit of talking out loud in public about classified information, like all the assassinations he’s performed or facilitated — including a big one, in Dallas in November 1963.
The two CIA guys are traveling to Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as the Indigenous people there call it. (A lot of locals were hired to be the film crew for this movie, since the giant stone heads at Rapa Nui aren’t the sort of things you can fake in Vancouver.) It’s a place Chris has always wanted to see before he dies, and he knows that’s going to happen soon, either from the cancer or from Lee killing him. What Chris doesn’t know is whether Lee is doing it because Chris asked him to, or because their station chief in Santiago, M.J. (Steve Buscemi), told him to.
Chris finds himself reciting his memoir into a tape recorder, which makes M.J. nervous, and making time with a Chilean tourist, Monica (Mariana Di Girolama), who provides some human perspective about Chris’ lifetime of lies and murder. Meanwhile, Lee is dealing with calls from his frazzled wife, Margie (Parker Posey), and a feeling that M.J. is getting impatient..
Writer-director Martin McDonagh — whose “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri” got Rockwell his Oscar — has a knack of pairing characters who get on each other’s nerves, and digging into their shared dislikes and how far they’ll push each other. The dynamic of Chris and Lee is reminiscent of the age-gapped gangsters on a forced road trip in McDonagh’s 2008 feature debut, “In Bruges.”
Malkovich hasn’t really cooked at this level since he played himself, sorta, in the 1999 meta-comedy “Being John Malkovich.” He manages the neat trick of making a rat bastard like Chris into someone who’s approachable and even sympathetic, even as you realize you should never get in the back of a car with him.
McDonagh’s movies — like “Three Billboards” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” — are freighted with laconic cynicism, and here the filmmaker argues that there’s no one more cynical than a CIA assassination guy. They’re also dark, funny and occasionally a bit tender, which make “Wild Horse Nine” the pitch-dark comedy we need right now.
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‘Wild Horse Nine’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, November 6, at several theaters. Rated R for pervasive language, some strong violence, drug use and sexual references. Running time: 118 minutes.