Wild Horse Nine review: Malkovich steals a darkly funny spy caper

Two tired CIA men, an island full of giant stone heads, and a job neither of them wants to finish. Wild Horse Nine is Martin McDonagh doing what he does best, and John Malkovich hasn't been this much fun in years.

It's a very good film, our 8 out of 10, and the critics broadly agree. It isn't McDonagh's most surprising work, and a few critics have a point when they say it feels familiar. But as a showcase for two actors at the top of their game, it's hard to beat.

The set-up is pure McDonagh. It's 1973, shortly before the coup in Chile, and two CIA officers are sent from Santiago to Easter Island. Chris (Malkovich) is a veteran with end-stage cancer who has asked his protégé, Lee (Sam Rockwell), to kill him before the illness does. Their bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), wants Chris dead too, for reasons that have nothing to do with mercy.

Parker Posey plays Lee's wife, Marge, and Tom Waits turns up as Chris's brother. McDonagh wrote and directed it, his first film since The Banshees of Inisherin, made for a reported $5 million and shot in Chile and on Rapa Nui itself.

It arrives with a trophy already. Malkovich won the Volpi Cup for best actor when the film premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival in September.

Malkovich unleashed

The reason to see Wild Horse Nine is Malkovich. Chris is dying, furious and wildly unpredictable, and Malkovich plays him with a mischief that keeps every scene off balance. Monica Castillo of The A.V. Club wrote that his performance comes "leaping out with impish glee, wrecking chaos with a smile and a touch of kooky grandpa silliness."

It takes some getting used to. Bill Bria of /Film, who gave the film 9 out of 10, admitted that the performance "can feel genuinely off-putting in the movie's early scenes." Stay with it. The film gets richer as it goes.

Rockwell is the perfect partner, the straight man who slowly realizes he's in a tragedy. The pair have the easy, needling rhythm of two men who have spent too long in each other's company, and they are the film's heart. "Malkovich and Rockwell make a great match," Castillo wrote.

The Easter Island locations, all green hills and stone giants, give the film a strange, sunlit beauty that In Bruges's medieval gloom never had.

Under the jokes, McDonagh has something to say about what the American government was doing in Chile. He lets it seep in slowly rather than lecturing, and it lands all the harder for it.

The problem nobody can ignore

If you've seen McDonagh's earlier films, you'll recognize a lot of this: two hitmen bickering abroad, a death everyone's circling, jokes that cut off into sudden violence. Yasmine Kandil of DiscussingFilm gave it 4 out of 5 but called its "only glaring setback" the "near-uncanny resemblance to its cinematic predecessors." It's a greatest-hits album, beautifully played.

Not every critic was charmed. Cameron K. Ritter of Geek Vibes Nation gave it 4 out of 10, writing that "nothing winds up fully realized by the time the credits roll" and that the film "winds up more mild than wild." Castillo, a fan, still found that "some of the antics and secondary details get a little too silly."

The supporting cast suffers most. Posey, so good in everything, is mostly kept away from the main story, as Kandil noted. At just under two hours, the film also takes its time getting going.

Worth the trip

Those complaints are real, but they're small next to what works. If you loved In Bruges or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, this is your film: profane, violent, very funny and, in its last stretch, surprisingly sad.

It's rated R and runs 1 hour 58 minutes, and it's worth seeing in a cinema, where those Easter Island skies look their best. Searchlight opens it on Nov. 6.

Malkovich already has his trophy from Venice. On this evidence, it won't be his last this awards season.