{"id":624066,"date":"2026-09-22T17:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T17:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/624066\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T17:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T17:08:09","slug":"wild-horse-nine-review-martin-mcdonagh-film-is-peak-malkovich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/624066\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Horse Nine review: Martin McDonagh film is peak Malkovich"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Malkovich has played his fair share of quirky roles, even going so far as to poke fun at his outsized persona in Spike Jonze\u2019s Being John Malkovich<\/a>. In recent years, he\u2019s spent more time on the stage or as bit characters in movies and TV shows, but in Martin McDonagh\u2019s black comedy Wild Horse Nine, Malkovich is the main attraction, his performance leaping out with impish glee, wrecking chaos with a smile and a touch of kooky grandpa silliness. His co-stars Sam Rockwell and Steve Buscemi can only furrow their brow in frustration, as they\u2019re no match for Malkovich\u2019s loose-cannon performance and McDonagh\u2019s quippy script.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After an illustrious career of covert operations\u2014and, potentially, a presidential assassination\u2014Chris (Malkovich) takes a long-deserved break from his current mission in Chile, with fellow CIA agent Lee (Rockwell), to Easter Island. Only, it\u2019s Chris\u2019 last trip, even if his end-stage cancer doesn\u2019t kill him. Lee has orders, from their boss MJ (Buscemi), to retrieve Chris\u2019 gun from the John F. Kennedy assassination, destroy the memoir he\u2019s working on, and take him out. Chris has simply become too much of a security risk in the lead-up to the 1973, CIA-backed coup of Chilean President Salvador Allende. But nothing quite goes according to plan, as Chris is a man who takes his own orders.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like a hurricane battering everything within reach, Malkovich is an unpredictable force of nature. At times, he plays Chris like an innocuous older relative with too many questions, needling Lee to his last nerve, but that sharp acuity can just as quickly give away to some loopy observation, or an innocent obsession with the island\u2019s wild horses. It\u2019s later revealed that Chris takes morphine to manage his pain from the cancer, but Malkovich makes him a sympathetic character even before that. He carries a doomed fatalism both from his illness and from the nature of his character\u2019s line of work; either way, he knows he\u2019s a dead man walking. That doesn\u2019t stop Chris from being an absolute menace just about everywhere he goes.\u00a0 He\u2019s still volatile enough to make confrontations dangerous. Rockwell, playing his faithful foil, mostly tries to hang on and keep up his double-agent act, placating his boss while genuinely trying to be there for his dying colleague.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The men\u2019s dynamic in Wild Horse Nine is not dissimilar from some of McDonagh\u2019s previous duos, like the pairings of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in The Banshees Of Inisherin<\/a> or In Bruges<\/a>, especially the latter. Like In Bruges, the co-workers in Wild Horse Nine are on holiday for what will be one of their last trips before certain death. Like Gleeson\u2019s character, Rockwell\u2019s Lee is reluctant to pull that final trigger, but he has extra incentive to do so this time, since Chris made him promise to kill him before a long, protracted death from cancer. This softens the all-but-assured end, and like In Bruges, so much happens between those two points that the similarities more or less stop there. McDonagh is fascinated by these men\u2019s tortured relationships, the camaraderie that forms when they become partners in crime, and the loyalty that becomes stronger than their marching orders. Even in the business of death, there\u2019s an unspoken code that holds them together, til death do them part.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As both the film\u2019s writer and director, McDonagh has fine-tuned the speed of his zippy, screwball dialogue, which Malkovich and Rockwell trade with tenacity\u2014as do their co-stars, like the increasingly frazzled Buscemi, a mournful Tom Waits, and a delightfully pouty Parker Posey, who makes a brief appearance as Lee\u2019s cheating wife. While some of the antics and secondary details get a little too silly (a CIA agent holds on to the smoking gun that took out JFK for what, sentimental value?), Malkovich and Rockwell make a great match, arguing with each other and fighting against everyone else. Like in McDonagh\u2019s previous comedies about complicated relationships, Wild Horse Nine is more than just about the shenanigans that get these men into trouble, it\u2019s about the lonely misfit souls who find camaraderie in the least likely of partners.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Director: Martin McDonagh
Writer: Martin McDonagh
Starring: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, Parker Posey
Release Date: November 6, 2026 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Malkovich has played his fair share of quirky roles, even going so far as to poke fun…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-624066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}