Review: ‘Wild Horse Nine’ is positively, inescapably a Martin McDonagh film

An island. Two murderous eccentrics on assignment. The backdrop of a historic political turning point. Innocence lost. Razor-sharp dialogue and a moody Carter Burwell score. If you haven’t guessed by now, Wild Horse Nine is positively, inescapably the new film from Martin McDonagh.

On the cusp of the 1973 military coup that would overthrow Chilean President Salvador Allende, two world-weary CIA agents, Chris and Lee (John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell), travel to Easter Island on an undisclosed mission. At the airport, they encounter two young women brimming with optimism over Allende’s presidency and the promise it holds for Chile’s future. Chris, grappling with a cancer diagnosis, a failing memory and a rapidly dwindling supply of fucks to give, bluntly tells them, “Enjoy him while you can, ladies.”

To the women, and perhaps to the audience, he’s either a delusional old man or someone who knows considerably more than he’s letting on. It’s a delicious ambiguity that hangs over the film, casting a shadow across even its most seemingly innocent moments.

For two men whose line of work makes them inherently difficult to root for, Chris and Lee are remarkably easy company. Their prickly rapport and effortless banter give the film an immediate buoyancy. On the island, they dine out, marvel at wild horses, rescue moths, visit the famous moai statues (or, as they affectionately call them, “The Heads”), and flirt with the young women from the airport. Beneath these leisurely excursions, however, lies a far more sinister agenda: They are there to end Chris’ life.

Yes, they.

It’s with this revelation that Wild Horse Nine shifts its focus more intimately toward Chris. Faced with the ravages of cancer, he has enlisted Lee to end his life. Lee agrees, not as an agent carrying out an assignment, but as a friend honoring an intimate request. Complicating matters is their superior, MJ (Steve Buscemi), who has his own vested interest in seeing Chris dead. The aging operative has been quietly writing his memoirs, and MJ fears that the secrets contained within could expose a major intelligence scandal.

What begins as a seemingly routine assignment for two aging instruments of American foreign policy slowly reveals itself as something far more personal: a reckoning with mortality, loyalty, and the consequences of a lifetime spent doing terrible things in the service of supposedly greater causes. Line after line, Chris devastates with the poetry of a dying man. 

Looking blue after an encounter with one of the young women, Lee asks “What’s the matter, was she mean to you?” “No,” he says. “She’s life and I’m leaving it.” Looking inward, he says “Cancer dies, too. We forget that.” And confronting his regrets as if for the first time, he says, “I could have killed a few less people and I should have hung out with a lot more horses.” 

With a gorgeous Monument Valley-set homage to John Ford’s The Searchers, featuring a memorable cameo from Tom Waits, Wild Horse Nine takes its place in the proud tradition of Westerns grappling with morality and mortality. But McDonagh’s film stands on its own hind legs, reminding us that the most unforgiving frontier is often the one within ourselves.