{"id":879026,"date":"2026-09-03T23:38:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T23:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/879026\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T23:38:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T23:38:10","slug":"wild-horse-nine-review-malkovich-and-rockwell-head-to-easter-island-for-mcdonaghs-acid-bromance-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/879026\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Horse Nine review \u2013 Malkovich and Rockwell head to Easter Island for McDonagh\u2019s acid bromance | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

It isn\u2019t a Martin McDonagh movie unless you\u2019ve got two morose guys \u2013 one old, one not so old \u2013 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<\/a>, the older guy decides he wants nothing more to do with the younger guy; in In Bruges from 14 years earlier<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

Wild Horse Nine brings McDonagh to a US setting with American (not Irish) characters and dialogue. But as in another US-set film \u2013 2012\u2019s Seven Psychopaths<\/a> \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Secrets and lies \u2026 the pair on Easter Island. Photograph: Entertainment Pictures\/Alamy<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/a> about him \u2013 guys accustomed to off-the-record work, for which Uncle Sam will never be able to reward them publicly.<\/p>\n

But just before the big moment, Chris heads off on some kind of semi-sanctioned holiday to Easter Island \u2013 of all the wacky and unexpected places \u2013 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 Ail\u00edn Salas.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Maybe this trip to Easter Island will calm Chris down or maybe it will have the opposite effect. Lee assumes Easter Island was Chris\u2019s 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\u2019t know it. He is in fact one of the most important people in CIA<\/a> history, and indeed American history.<\/p>\n

There is a fair amount of drollery in the Easter Island statues themselves, which they derisively call the \u201cheads\u201d (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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

John Malkovich in Wild Horse Nine. Photograph: Entertainment Pictures\/Alamy<\/p>\n

There are some laughs here, and some lively moments, but persistent, slightly jarring violent flourishes inevitably coexist with sentimentality \u2013 although that sentimentality might not erase the audience\u2019s concern about a certain situation concerning Lee\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Wild Horse Nine screened at the Venice film festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It isn\u2019t a Martin McDonagh movie unless you\u2019ve got two morose guys \u2013 one old, one not so…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":879027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-879026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}