“Wild Horse Nine” Gets Lost on Easter Island
The New Yorker · Justin Chang ·
Justin Chang reviews Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” a comic thriller starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as a pair of C.I.A. men on Easter Island in 1973.
That tragedy looms heavily, but also with an air of jokey inconsequence, over “Wild Horse Nine,” a new film written and directed by Martin McDonagh. It begins in 1973, in Santiago, Chile, where Chris Carlisle (Malkovich), a longtime C.I.A. operative, is stationed. Early on, he reminisces about the popularly elected regimes that he’s toppled, from Guatemala to Congo, and—here his voice drops to a low murmur—acknowledges a prominent role in the Kennedy assassination. Yet, despite this dabbling in POTUS-cide, Chris is something of an anti-Booth; he has too much debonair wit, too much bon-vivant style. He and his loyal protégé, Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell), are headed to Easter Island for a week, and Chris, looking dandy in bright-colored neckties and a porkpie hat, has no use for disguises. As for a rabbit’s foot, forget it: Chris’s luck has run out. He’s dying of cancer and has decided that Easter Island will be his last hurrah. He wants Lee, whose marksmanship he trusts as much as his friendship, to hasten his departure.
Lee, whose frequent exasperation with Chris is a sure sign of love, has his own problems back home in the U.S., chiefly a “drunk wife who fucks clowns.” That’s Chris’s odd, harsh appraisal, and it is repeated, mirthlessly, when we finally meet said wife (Parker Posey), badgering Lee over the phone. Whenever McDonagh hits a stale comic patch like this, he retreats swiftly into the trappings of plot: Lee is understandably less than thrilled about Chris’s instant-death wish, but, by all appearances, M.J. (a cranky Steve Buscemi), the C.I.A.’s South American bureau chief, already has a finger on the trigger. Chris, often strung out on morphine, his memory and his wits addled by cancer, has become a jaw-flapping liability.
Despite the far-flung setting and the spy-thriller machinations, then, we are in terrain that McDonagh knows all too well: the bloody buddy comedy. Like his film “In Bruges” (2008), “Wild Horse Nine” follows two hit men on holiday, and, like “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), it conjures the verdant magic of a remote island setting. Yet the flavor of the proceedings is markedly different. In “Inisherin,” a bitter clash between two friends, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson (who both also starred in “In Bruges”), felt exquisitely of a piece with the local elements: the mists, the jagged rocks, the salty tang of the sea. The outdoors lent a wry, soulful grandeur to the characters’ expletive-riddled bickering.
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