(Above: John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell in Wild Horse Nine (2026). Photo by Diego Araya Corvalán/Searchlight Pictures – © 2006 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved).

By M. Faust

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Two men, professional killers, are taking an odd vacation in a place known for its beauty and removed from their usual territory. One of them suffers from guilt over his actions. The other is in contact by phone with their handler, from whom we learn that only one of them is expected to return alive. 

This is the plot of the 2008 dark comedy In Bruges, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as Irish hit men sent away to spend time in the medieval Belgian city. 

It’s also the plot of McDonagh’s new film Wild Horse Nine, starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell. They play Chris and Lee, CIA agents who have spent 1973 in Santiago working on destabilizing the government of the recently elected Marxist president Salvador Allende.

Chris is a particular specialist in this field, having apparently participated in every CIA dirty op of the previous two decades. Dying of cancer, he is regretting his sins and threatening to write his memoirs, something that his boss MJ (Steve Buscemi) is not going to let happen. On a trip to Rapa Nui, once known as Easter Island, Lee struggles to balance his obligations with his affection for his admittedly difficult partner. 

I could go on more about the similarities between the two films, but not without spoilers. What I can’t tell you is why McDonagh, a successful playwright before he turned to movies, would so blatantly recycle an old idea.

While Wild Horse Nine is unsparing in its contempt for the CIA’s role over the year in interfering with the governments of other countries, it doesn’t bring anything new to the discussion. If you’re not already familiar with what went down in Guatemala and Congo and Chile and maybe even Dallas, you won’t learn much here. 

What we do get is another exploration of male relationships and guilt, also the theme of McDonagh’s most recent movie, The Banshees of Inisherin. This is offset with a lot of Tarantino-ish dialogue in which guys deliver baroquely profane diatribes that are amusing but don’t really have much to do with the plot, such as Chris’s theory of the intertwining of democracy, homosexuality and cheese. 

What makes it all worth seeing is he performances, particularly from Malkovich. He evokes sympathy for a character who probably doesn’t deserve it, giving a more layered performance than the comic villains he has been amusingly playing for the past few decades. Rockwell, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is almost as good, and the script also offers juicy supporting parts for Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey.