Wild Horse Nine review: Malkovich and Rockwell head to Easter Island for McDonagh’s acid bromance

It isn’t a Martin McDonagh movie unless you’ve got two morose guys – one old, one not so old – who do nothing all the livelong day but bitch and snipe and quarrel and exchange barbed bromantic dialogue while occasionally going off on a plaintive tangent about nothing at all, incidentally revealing something very wrong with their friendship. If it can be called that. In The Banshees of Inisherin from 2022, the older guy decides he wants nothing more to do with the younger guy; in In Bruges from 14 years earlier (of which this latest film is almost a retread or maybe B-side), the older guy has an awful secret he is keeping from the younger guy.

Wild Horse Nine brings McDonagh to a US setting with American (not Irish) characters and dialogue. But as in another US-set film – 2012’s Seven Psychopaths – Americanness can bring out something less interesting in McDonagh: more violence, more strenuous sweary machismo, less comedy, less charm. Yet there is something interesting and watchably acrid in the pairing of Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich, with Malkovich unspooling long speeches in that unmistakable nasal croon or whine, often concluding with his lips parted in a pursed-lip pout, a mannerism that leaves the audience unsure exactly how ironic or contemptuous he is supposed to sound.

Secrets and lies … the pair on Easter Island. Photograph: Entertainment Pictures/Alamy

As with In Bruges, we have two seasoned pro killers who find themselves surreally marooned in a place that baffles them. Malkovich and Rockwell are Chris and Lee, a pair of sweaty CIA operatives stationed in Santiago, Chile, in 1973, preparing for an important covert operation to whack the country’s president Salvador Allende, who has had the temerity to be a democratically elected socialist. They are at different stages of cynicism and disillusion: each has something of G Gordon Liddy about him – guys accustomed to off-the-record work, for which Uncle Sam will never be able to reward them publicly.

But just before the big moment, Chris heads off on some kind of semi-sanctioned holiday to Easter Island – of all the wacky and unexpected places – and Lee, in a mood of affectionate exasperation, must accompany him as his minder and pal. This is because Chris is very sick, with a serious self-administered morphine habit. To the fury of their hated boss MJ (Steve Buscemi), he is now working on his indiscreet memoirs and has a new habit of talking to complete strangers about his various wet jobs and black ops, including two young Chilean students, played by Mariana Di Girolamo and Ailín Salas.

Maybe this trip to Easter Island will calm Chris down or maybe it will have the opposite effect. Lee assumes Easter Island was Chris’s idea, but Chris hilariously reveals that he wanted to go somewhere else. And all the time, the awful truth about Chris begins to surface. To paraphrase Shakespeare, he has done the state some service but they can’t know it. He is in fact one of the most important people in CIA history, and indeed American history.

There is a fair amount of drollery in the Easter Island statues themselves, which they derisively call the “heads” (which are funny in their deadpan Keatonian way) although almost everywhere they go our two antiheroes are reproved and corrected by fellow tourists and visitors for not using the indigenous terms Rapa Nui for the island and Moai for the statues – though I suspect that this is a 2026 issue, not a 1973 issue, for visitors. As for the unrepentant old bad boy Chris, he lets people know his utter derision for civil rights liberal movements along with his soft spot for the IRA against the British.

John Malkovich in Wild Horse Nine. Photograph: Entertainment Pictures/Alamy

There are some laughs here, and some lively moments, but persistent, slightly jarring violent flourishes inevitably coexist with sentimentality – although that sentimentality might not erase the audience’s concern about a certain situation concerning Lee’s wife and kids, whose wellbeing at the end seems to be heartlessly forgotten about. Not a McDonagh classic, but some nice riffing from Rockwell and Malkovich.