Good writing in modern cinema is rare but Martin McDonagh gives it to his audiences in waves.
His latest writer-director performance, Wild Horse Nine (2026), is one of the most entertaining films of this or any other year.
McDonagh has a spectacular CV, beginning with Irish short film Six Shooter (2004) to In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), The Banishees of Inirsherin (2022) and the current release. Sadly he brings us a movie only once every 4-5 years. Or perhaps we shouldn’t be so greedy and appreciate the time taken to put these productions together.
If one wanted to extrapolate that further, how long would it take to come up with the plots let alone the brilliant dialogue each one possesses?
His films tend to be about male friendships often involving complete opposites but he also wrote an Oscar-winning part for Frances McDormand in Three Billboards…
Wild Horse Nine’s two male leads are certainly unalike, although each is a CIA assassin, operating in Santiago, Chile in 1973. Chris (John Malkovich) is dying of cancer and has asked his younger protege, Lee (Sam Rockwell), to kill him. Their boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi) allows them a trip to nearby Rapa Nui (Easter Island) so the deed can be done but has an ulterior motive. He wants any hint of Chris’s intended memoirs to be gathered so as not to embarrass the agency.
Chris, over 70, losing his memory and dying has become a loose cannon. He is reckless with the information he reveals to strangers, more it seems in losing respect for his role rather than trying to impress them. He also is using morphine to dull his pain.
He and Lee are part of a team undermining the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende, a Marxist, whose leadership is anathema to the Nixon administration in Washington. The agents are collecting information on leftists for use by the military junta waiting to overthrow the government.
Lee has his own problems with his serially-unfaithful wife Margie (Parker Posey), back in the US but his primary concern is being Chris’s virtual minder. He sits incredulously at the airport while Chris tells two young women about his job and how their country will eventually be taken over.
All this is pulled off with brilliant performances from the two leads. Malkovich, always good, surpasses himself. Rockwell, who has twice collaborated with McDonagh in Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards…, is just as good. However, he is Dean Martin to Malkovich’s Jerry Lewis and has to play second fiddle to the older player, one thinks much like their on-screen work roles at previous assignments.
McDonagh builds the story line in small increments and, through outbursts from MJ and words spoken into his dictaphone for the memoirs, it emerges that Chris was responsible for the “second shooter” of John F Kennedy in November, 1963. It is a secret he has carried for a decade, while the world has been led to believe that Kennedy’s assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald, “who acted alone.”
The different kinds of stone head sculptures on Easter Island and scenes of wild horses galloping free provide the backdrop in this unlikely place for Chris’s demise. He tells Lee that his staged suicide will be believed because there will be no criminal investigation unit on the island.
As Chris takes moments for himself he is often joined by the same lone horse, a metaphor for the man he is, an individual and a loner and nine is his room number at the hotel where he and Lee stay.
The two women at the airport Monica (Maria Di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailin Salas) are staying at the same hotel. and their presence will have a big impact on what Chris and Lee do.
Indeed Chris’s frank admissions to a horrified Monica of what is going to happen in her country provide her with previously unimaginable life lessons which keep her alive.
The dialogue, particularly between the two buddies, is so entertaining and darkly funny; the interior scenes of 1973 and the characters’ clothing is sublime; and the music soundtrack spot on.
4.5
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OTHER ASIDES
–Wild Horse Nine is a forerunner of events which crystallised exactly as Chris explains to Monica. He tells her Allende will be deposed in September and anyone considered remotely leftist will be rounded up and placed in Estadio Nacional, from where many of them would never leave. On 11 September, 1973, Allende’s presidential palace was surrounded by troops and he took his own life after making a final radio broadcast to the nation.
-In the Costa-Gavras film Missing (1982), Jack Lemmon plays a patriotic US businessman who travels to Chile to find out the whereabouts of his idealistic son, missing since the Pinochet coup. Lemmon’s only contacts are the son’s wife, Sissy Spacek, and the US embassy. While he clashes with the wife’s politics and expects the embassy to be totally forthcoming in assistance, his illusions about the America he thinks he knows are gradually taken apart. He begins to realise the courage of his son, and especially the wife, in pursuing justice. The two are allowed into Estadio Nacional to find him and eventually leave Chile with his body.
The almost comic CIA assassins in Wild Horse Nine are similar to the shadowy CIA figures in Missing, omnipresent at the embassy and in the city during the quest to find the son/husband.
-Gavras also directed Z (1969), one of the best political thrillers ever made. Though set in a fictitious Mediterranean country, it follows a tenacious judge who wants to bring assassins to justice after the 1963 murder of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis. A champion of peace, Lambrakis, became an inspiration for the people in the years before a military junta in1967.
In Wild Horse Nine, the strong story line involving the assassination of US president John F Kennedy in 1963 and eventual military coup in Chile in 1973 and Lambrakis’s assassination and the later coup in Greece could be perceived to have been strong influences.
-McDonagh either has a favoured group of performers or they queue up to be in his five-yearly productions? Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Rockwell and Waits have each been in at least two of the writer-director’s work and Gleeson was the lead in The Guard (2011) and Calvary (2014), directed by McDonagh’s older brother, John Michael McDonagh.
