Wild Horse Nine

Friendship has always been at the heart of Martin McDonagh’s cinema. Beneath the bloodshed and sharp banter, his films are about people who desperately need each other- although, often, they’d rather shoot each other than admit it.

His latest, Wild Horse Nine, which galloped onto the Lido at the Venice Film Festival, is no exception.

Its CIA agents are hardly the sleek, omniscient operators of the spy-movie imagination. Sent to Chile to destabilise Salvador Allende’s government, they are less masters of geopolitical intrigue than two dangerously capable idiots. Chris, a veteran operative played by John Malkovich in his best role in decades, is not shy about it. Terminally ill , he has reached the point in life where discretion has become someone else’s problem. He flirts, overshares, confirms conspiracy theories and scatters classified information with the breezy confidence of a man who has nothing left to lose, and is even determined to write a memoir exposing the rest. His final wish is simple: to spend his remaining days on Easter Island. So his partner Lee, wonderfully played by Sam Rockwell, reluctantly agrees to take him on one last holiday.

You can already see the shape of it: two bumbling, morally compromised killers, sightseeing beneath an unfamiliar sky, confronting their shared past and quietly wondering whether the trip will end with reconciliation, murder, or both.
You’ve seen this before.
It’s In Bruges with a passport and considerably larger statues. But after all it’s McDonagh’s formula, and it works. It works spectacularly.

McDonagh once again demonstrates his gift for making two deeply unpleasant men talk absolute rubbish until something unexpectedly moving emerges from the wreckage. The dialogue is viciously funny, the punchlines arrive with sniper-like precision, and the chemistry between Malkovich and Rockwell gives the film a deliciously loose rhythm.

Yet Wild Horse Nine never feels like a mere retread. Where In Bruges was steeped in guilt and Catholic melancholy, this film is looser, more mature and more openly playful. The espionage plot is less a destination than an excuse. McDonagh uses the machinery of the thriller to ask a more intimate question: what remains of a friendship when the life that forged it is coming to an end?

The answer, naturally, involves lies, resentment, loyalty, murders, and a surprising amount of sightseeing.

That contrast gives the film its pulse. The comedy is buoyed by the looming reality of Chris’s mortality, while the sadness is constantly punctured by some filthy joke or spectacularly bad decision. McDonagh never lets sentimentality smother the laughter, nor allows the laughter to erase the grief underneath. The two coexist, often in the same scene, occasionally in the same line.
That may be McDonagh’s great trick: making friendship feel simultaneously sacred and completely stupid.

This is not really a spy thriller. It is a surreal, darkly comic farewell between two men trying to work out what they mean to each other before time makes the question irrelevant. All of these while the Moai loom over the film like enormous, silent witnesses, their inscrutable faces fixed on these two ridiculous men as they stumble through their final chapter together.

A riotous, unexpectedly tender opening salvo on the Lido , and a film that already looks like a serious contender when awards season comes calling.