Wild Horse Nine

Martin McDonagh is back with his latest two-hander-with-a-few-significant-extra-fingers that explores male friendship and violence with a breathtaking location as a backdrop. This latest film is once again about killers, though a different type than those found in McDonagh's In Bruges or Seven Psychopaths. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA officers taking a vacation after setting up the coup that will overthrow Chilean President Salvador Allende and install the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which will last for the next 17 years. Malkovich's Chris Carlisle won't be around to see the results of his handywork, as he's in the last days of terminal brain cancer. A Catholic who doesn't approve of suicide, he's asked his protégé, Rockwell's Lee Chesterfield, to take him to Easter Island and "retire" him somewhere scenic that he's never been to, where there won't be many questions asked. But Chris's memory is so bad, Lee's not even sure if his mentor remembers what he's asked him to do.

The film is full of the type of hilariously blunt banter we go to a McDonagh film or play to hear, and Malkovich, working for the first time with this writer-director, who has tried to cast him in multiple earlier projects, gets his best role in decades. Chris's cancer-ridden brain fog and the morphine he takes for the pain, combined with his age and pending mortality, have removed whatever self-censor this guy had to begin with. That censor was probably limited to being tight-lipped about CIA operations, but he no longer seems to care even about that. Chris' loose lips worries the CIA's Chile bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), who has heard that Chris plans to write a memoir before he checks out.

All this provides the 72-year-old Malkovich with a career-capping role that cleverly references many of great actors' professional highlights and is sure to score him an Oscar nomination, but it also enables McDonagh to formulate both a nice existential meditation and a scathing appraisal of America's bloody, corrupt, and morally reprehensible international interventionism just in time for Thanksgiving screenings with your dad. It's impressive how subtly McDonagh weaves so much thematic and extratextual nuance into this little story about two profane murderers we can't help but enjoy spending time with. All that layered subtext is what prevents Wild Horse Nine from feeling like a retread of the writer/director's earlier work. It's just too bad about the plethora of anachronisms McDonagh allows to infect an otherwise carefully constructed text. Each time a character uses a word in a modern context or behaves in a manner totally at odds with how people acted in the '70s, it pulls us out of the picture and undercuts the otherwise excellent work of everyone involved.