Martin McDonagh's 'Wild Horse Nine' is both secondhand and first-rate

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Review

Both secondhand and first-rate, playwright Martin McDonagh’s fifth big-screen feature is a mix-and-match grab bag of homages, revisions and familiar tropes that casts its own uniquely melancholic, at times blisteringly funny spell. Structurally, “Wild Horse Nine” is for all intents and purposes a remake of the director’s first (and still best) film, 2008’s “In Bruges.” McDonagh is once again tagging along with two professional killers — a younger man and his mentor — on an exotic vacation from which only one is expected to return. Except instead of those garrulous Irish gangsters from the earlier picture, this time we’re travelling with a pair of none-too-smooth CIA assassins, both taking a breather from setting up the Pinochet coup in 1973 Chile to go gawk at “the big heads” on Easter Island.

John Malkovich gets his meatiest role in decades as Chris, a longtime agency veteran suffering from terminal brain cancer and a budding morphine addiction that have left his behavior on the dangerously erratic side as of late, blurting out classified secrets in crowded airports and such. Malkovich’s slurry, insouciant line readings are imbued with a child’s naughty self-satisfaction, yet we can never be sure how much of this is an act Chris is putting on. There’s a wily old spy lurking beneath all the inappropriate outbursts, cunningly aware that this trip is part of a forced retirement plan he might not choose to accept. Sam Rockwell co-stars as Chris’ partner/minder Lee, an exhausted straight man stuck riding shotgun for his best friend’s decline. Rockwell’s role isn’t as showy as Malkovich’s, but the affable, rubber-limbed goofball has to carry the movie’s heavy heart.

They’re murderers, rotten to the core. I suppose it says something that a major awards season contender from a Disney subsidiary makes no bones about U.S. interventionists being extremely bad actors overseas, installing tinpot dictators and assassinating dissidents in order to manipulate markets. (I mean, we always knew this stuff was going on, but big Hollywood studios used to at least pretend we were the good guys.) Chris becomes smitten with an idealistic student activist named Monica (Mariana Di Girolamo) who’s staying at their hotel. The relationship has a more elegiac dimension than the usual icky old man/young girl longings, with Monica serving the same metaphorical purpose as the free-roaming horses from which the film takes its title. Or as Chris explains in one of the movie’s bluntest, most affecting lines, “She’s life, and I’m leaving it.”

Not soon enough, if you ask the harried CIA boss played by Steve Buscemi, whose penchant for on-the-job naps becomes one of the film’s funniest running gags. He wants Chris “retired” as quickly as possible, before he can blab any more about a certain assignment the two completed in Dallas a decade prior. The killer supporting cast also includes Parker Posey as Lee’s scatterbrained, serially unfaithful wife. Her recent affair with a clown is a source of great, impish amusement to the cuckold’s ailing partner, and to the audience as well. Tom Waits calls in a devastating cameo from a distant location in John Ford’s Monument Valley, standing in for a mythical idea of America that’s been betrayed by these men doing its bidding on the world stage.

The Ford vistas are just a few of the movie’s sometimes clumsy allusions. McDonagh has clearly designed “Wild Horse Nine” as an encyclopedic shrine to its star, with the central gimmick of Malkovich playing a CIA agent in the midst of writing a memoir lifted outright from the Coen brothers’ 2008 “Burn After Reading,” the oddball actor’s last great role before this one. Making Chris central to what happened in Dallas back in 1963 is an inspired riff on Malkovich’s chilling “In the Line of Fire” assassin, a performance so scary he scored an Oscar nomination for playing the bad guy in a Clint Eastwood summer action movie. The final stretch of “Wild Horse Nine” is brazenly modeled on John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” a text that has loomed large in Malkovich lore ever since the actor headlined a legendary Steppenwolf Theatre adaptation that was later filmed by his co-star, Gary Sinise. The role of Chris is a lovingly thorough gift from McDonagh, and Malkovich makes the most of it.

Set in 1973 with a sickly, brown-and-mustard color palette to prove it, “Wild Horse Nine” otherwise has little interest in period detail. The main characters swap anachronistic trash talk — I love the f-word but wish McDonagh would use it about 15% less frequently — while Monica and her fellow students speak in jarringly modern woke lingo. Part of me thinks this might be because cultural norms have shifted so much that progressive terminology from 53 years ago would sound backwards and offensive today, but it’s probably more that McDonagh can’t resist tweaking contemporary pieties. He’s become a favorite object of scorn for cultural hall monitors on social media, who still haven’t unclutched their pearls after his 2017 “ Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri ” dared suggest that a deplorable bigot might not be beyond redemption.

McDonagh loves his scoundrels, the damned most of all, which is why he’s made Chris an engineer of one of the 20th century’s defining tragedies. Framed against the mysterious moai statues of Easter Island, it’s easy to see the character as an avatar of another crumbling civilization. Childish, violent, charming and larger-than-life, Malkovich is playing all the promise of America, now sickly and gone to rot. Chris pines for symbols of freedom like wild horses and pretty young girls while remaining a prisoner of sworn allegiances to dubious masters who have left him with nothing but regrets. It’s over for him. And he’s us.

“Wild Horse Nine” opens in theaters on Thursday, Nov. 5.

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