Wild Horse Nine

In 1973, the CIA was behind the assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist leader in the world.  Irish director Martin McDonagh’s new film “Wild Horse Nine” uses the Allende plot as the backdrop for a light but ultimately satisfying romp featuring veteran actor John Malkovich at his cantankerous best.  Malkovich plays CIA agent Chris Carlisle, currently stationed in Santiago, Chile, with his professional partner Lee Chesterfield, played by McDonagh favorite Sam Rockwell.

The plot set-up

Chris, dying of cancer, has always wanted to see Easter Island, and the CIA has arranged for the two agents to spend a week there – away from work, and providing Chris the opportunity to finally see what he continually refers to as the “big heads,” much to the consternation of some of the locals, who prefer to use their indigenous name.  But, as we might expect from an original McDonagh screenplay, there’s more to the story than simply a vacation.

You see, in large part due to his use of morphine to ease the pain caused by his cancer, Chris has lost his proverbial filter.  He practically spills the beans about the forthcoming Allende assassination to two young ladies he and Lee meet in the Santiago airport, waiting to board their flight to Easter Island.  Later at a bar, he warns Monica, the more innocent of the two, how to prepare for the roundup of Chilean citizens that will follow the Allende murder.  She’s played by Chilean television actress Mariana di Girolama Arteaga.

CIA walks a fine line

South American Bureau Chief M.J. (Steve Buscemi, who also stars now in “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York”) wants Lee to kill Chris before he gives away too much information about CIA operations, both past and future.  And in fact, Chris has asked Lee to kill him before the cancer takes his life.  But on the other hand, MJ doesn’t want Lee to knock off Chris until he finds the memoir Chris is writing about his life and career.  There may be some pertinent information regarding the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy in those memoirs, and MJ is under instruction to obtain this intelligence prior to knocking off Chris.

The problem is Chris hasn’t written down anything on paper yet.  All his CIA musings – as well as some humorous non-CIA reflections on dinosaurs – have been spoken into a hand-held cassette tape recorder, with no structure, organization, or thought process.  When something he deems relevant pops into his mind, Chris will speak it into the tape recorder.  Lee needs to find all Chris’ verbal meanderings before simply shooting him.  And that act in itself proves difficult for Lee, as the two have been work partners for years.

Amusing conversation

It sounds like there’s a lot of plot in “Wild Horse Nine,” but there really isn’t.  Most of the joy of watching this film is the conversation between Malkovich and Rockwell.  Remember John Travolta’s “You know what they call a Big Mac in France?” spiel in “Pulp Fiction?”  Malkovich has a myriad of those in “Wild Horse Nine,” the funniest of which occurs when a restaurant on Easter Island serves him a package of Kraft cheese sticks with his meal.  He takes off on a tangent about how the best cheeses come from “gay” countries like France, Holland, and England.  Whereas “manly” countries like Russia and the United States are superior at warfare but produce terrible cheese.  Not only is the premise of his argument ridiculous, but his archaic use of the word “gay” to describe a country whose military is inferior to that of the US makes his banter even funnier, albeit politically incorrect.

John Malkovich

For my money, I could have simply watched Malkovich carry on in this manner for two hours, regardless of the plot.  In this sense, “Wild Horse Nine” is somewhat reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers,” released earlier this year, in which Ian McKellen played an aging artist downloading every thought that popped into his head.  Again, I could have just watched McKellen’s repartee for two hours with hardly any plot structure at all.

Based on facts, but not factual

As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that McDonagh’s original screenplay is certainly based on facts.  But it’s not all factual.  It’s never been proven that the CIA had anything to do with the Kennedy assassination.  But they were behind the death and removal from office of Salvador Allende.  In this respect, “Wild Horse Nine” slightly mirrors Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” in which many of the characters were real people – and the Manson Family murder of actress Sharon Tate was a real occurrence – but most of the characters were written for the film.  Same with “Wild Horse Nine.”  I’d be shocked if the Malkovich character resembled anything close to any actual CIA agent.

Where does it rank?

So, where does “Wild Horse Nine” rank among McDonagh’s work?  Well, it’s infinitely superior to his last effort, 2022’s preposterously awful “The Banshees of Inisherin,” in which Brendan Gleeson played a man intent on cutting off his fingers, one at a time, until a lifelong former friend mends fences with him.  If that one was supposed to be funny, it was so dark the humor was lost – at least on American audiences.  Prior to that, he directed 2017’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” for which Frances McDormand won a Best Actress Oscar playing a woman who rents three rural billboards begging the local sheriff to please solve the crime of her daughter’s murder.  I had that thoroughly engrossing film at #2 on my list of that year’s best pictures.  And I almost put it on my list of the ten best of the entire decade.

As you might expect, “Wild Horse Nine” fits somewhere in between.  Suffice to say it’s nowhere near as bad as “The Banshees of Inisherin,” but then neither are my home movies.  But it doesn’t quite rise to the level of “Three Billboards” – an original McDonagh screenplay that layered on multiple levels of plot in an intriguing story that was always one step ahead of the viewer.  “Wild Horse Nine” features much less plot, but one of the greatest performances of the year by John Malkovich, with all his wickedly funny circuitous babble.

Anderson curse

In a way, McDonagh is similar to Paul Thomas Anderson, who cursed himself with last year’s plot-driven Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle “One Battle After Another.”  If anyone else had directed “One Battle,” it would have felt like a masterpiece.  But Anderson had directed a bevy of better, more interesting, character-focused films, making “One Battle” seem like a bit of a letdown.  The same applies to McDonagh.  If he hadn’t made “Three Billboards,” “Wild Horse Nine” would feel like an instant classic.  But given his pedigree, “Wild Horse Nine” comes off as just the slightest disappointment.  It is a brilliant piece of filmmaking, and if I had to produce a Top Ten List for 2026 right now, I’m sure I’d place it solidly on that list.  But it’s simply not another treasure on the level of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

 

 

 

 

 

Andy Ray‘s reviews also appear on https://townepost.com/tag/film-review/