‘Wild Horse Nine’ Review: Martin McDonagh’s Prickly but Unconvincing CIA Satire Recasts ‘In Bruges’ as the Stuff of a Classic Western

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Another melancholically splenetic Martin McDonagh jag about a banter-mad pair of murderers who go on a boys trip to purgatory (where they search their souls as they wait for death to find them), the prickly but unconvincing “Wild Horse Nine” strains to translate the post-Guy Ritchie bark of “In Bruges” into the language of a classic American Western. In this case, an American Western set on Easter Island and backdropped by Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power in the fall of 1973.

McDonagh’s decision to recast his same old script against the backdrop of such a real and terrible event grants this new telling a welcome sense of scale, both in terms of its characters’ morality, as well as in regards to their greater place in history. But that decision is a double-edged sword that cuts the film off at the knees. Where “In Bruges” kicked off with the killing of a fictional altar boy, “Wild Horse Nine” is overshadowed by the deaths of thousands upon thousands of very real people, and that reality bleeds into the edges of the frame even when the seriocomic absurdity of McDonagh’s writing demands a world of pure invention.

Does the overlap make “Wild Horse Nine” feel glib? Yes, and thank god for that — if not for glibness the movie would lose the majority of its few solid laughs. The problem is that it also makes “Wild Horse Nine” feel as transparently manufactured as the CIA-backed overthrow of a foreign democracy. I can accept that an inexperienced hitman might have a dark night of the soul after shooting an innocent child during confession. By contrast, I struggle to believe that a veteran CIA agent who openly brags about his involvement in the Kennedy assassination would have a come-to-Jesus moment after orchestrating the demise of Salvador Allende. McDonagh has some good fun wrestling with whether or not we should care about such a mottled change of heart, but the point is gradually rendered moot in a movie whose emotions are less credible than its conspiracies.

The original Company man, Chris (John Malkovich, more locked in than he’s been on screen since “Burn After Reading”) is a natural hinge for the off-kilter comedy that McDonagh builds around him, in that he can be a joy to watch even when you don’t buy a word he’s saying. More than just an ordinary CIA agent, he’s the living personification of America’s efforts to destabilize foreign governments across the 20th century. He was close with Patrice Lumumba until the day the Congolese leader was executed by a firing squad. He was in Cuba to spur on the exiles who failed to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961. He was even in Dallas, USA on a Friday afternoon in November 1963, doing things his ornery boss MJ (Steve Buscemi) would much prefer he didn’t tell you about.

He traveled to all of those places, and got all of those people killed, with the blithe imperiousness of a flag waving in the wind. Chris says that he’s killed 68 people over the course of his career, and he offers that information as easily as a rumor — in a way that makes it sound like the number could be half that, or double, and it wouldn’t make a difference.

Recently, fate has blown Chris and his office husband/platonic life partner/exasperated straightman Lee (McDonagh vet Sam Rockwell) down south to Chile, where the two of them have been hard at work orchestrating the September 11th coup against the democratically elected socialist president, knowing full well that it would plunge the country into decades of brutal dictatorship. Chris appears to delight in sowing chaos, and the fact that he gets to wear a cute little Panama hat while he does it only boosts his joie de vivre.

But Chris is fraying at the seams in ways that we can’t see at first — ways that will only begin to reveal themselves when he and Lee decide to celebrate their imminent success with a sightseeing trip to Easter Island, a short 2,300 miles off the Western coast of Santiago. There are still a couple of months to go before the coup, but the wheels are in motion, and there’s little for these men to do for now besides fly to Rapa Nui, look at the “big heads,” flirt with a couple of beautiful young leftists (the prissier but gentler of whom is played by “Ema” mega-talent Mariana di Girolamo), and mordantly reflect upon their role in the awfulness Pinochet will soon inflict upon his own people. That task is complicated and confused by the fact that Chris seems to be losing his memory, which casts Lee in the role of his peevish but loving caretaker.

“Wild Horse Nine” is only the second feature that’s ever been shot on the ultra-remote soil of Rapa Nui (Kevin Reynolds’ 1994 epic “Rapa Nui” is credited as the first), and McDonagh rightly exalts in the fact that he’s brought Hollywood to the end of the world. The first half of his movie largely adheres to the fiction that Chris and Lee are just on Easter Island to fuck around, which offers a semi-relaxed opportunity for us to take in the sights. Ben Davis’ sun-bleached cinematography renders the hills and beaches of Rapa Nui with the veneer of a lost idyll, the ancient moai statues assuming an especially sacred charge when contrasted against such profane characters.

Chris bemusedly laughs the statues off with ethnographic glee, mocking one of the shorter figures as a dwarf (in case the “In Bruges” déjà vu wasn’t already strong enough), but it’s clear that he’s shaken by the fact that some of them almost 750 years old. That they’ve stood there in silent tribute to Polynesia’s ancestors as empires rose and fell on faraway shores, each of them a graveyard of forgotten people just like him. By the same token, it’s similarly clear that he’s trying to get at something in his own mind as he and Lee listen to Judy Collins in their rental car, argue over whether or not any Nazis made it into heaven (among other even more aggressively screen-written subjects), and whisper sweet nothings to the wild horses that run about the island, but the specific nature of that something is hard for him to pin down.

Malkovich has the time of his life with that search for Chris’ last speck of humanity, which shines up from the bottom of his soul as his mind continues to erode. At once both insidiously relaxed and also choked with Catholic guilt, Malkovich’s performance marries the nonchalance of a cowboy to the paranoia of a bounty target. One minute he’s waxing poetic about dinosaurs, and the next he’s rigging his luggage with explosives (maybe) and checking the “Memento”-like reminder notes he’s slipped into his jacket pocket.

“Wild Horse Nine” loves Chris too much to pretend like we’re not supposed to, but Malkovich never asks for our sympathy because he knows that he’ll get it anyway, and not just because the purpose of Rockwell’s character is to ensure that we do. It’s Chris’ job to make rooting for the bad guys feel like the right choice. It’s the cornerstone of America’s post-war foreign policy.

So while Chris might be cut from the same cloth as John Wayne (to the extent that Monument Valley is revealed to be a place of great importance to him), his arc is aimed in the opposite direction of the one that Ethan Edwards traces across “The Searchers”; Chris is a major asshole this movie gradually puckers into a wayward hero, and while it’s all too easy to root for him to complete that transformation before time runs out, at no point does “Wild Horse Nine” sell us on the premise that it would mean anything in the end — even to him.

The movie, blessedly, isn’t Catholic enough to offer Chris a big moment of divine expiation; in lieu of building to a grand confession, he and Lee simply run afoul of their CIA higher-ups until their PTO turns into a matter of American national security. Guns are fired. Hostages are taken. The word “fuck” is used like a punctuation mark, and regrets are muttered into the wind long after there’s any way for them to matter.

It all gets a bit too busy and madcap as “Wild Horse Nine” — freighted with sadness during even its cheekiest bits, as is McDonagh’s way — scrambles to make up for the general listlessness of its first half. Never as funny as it is sardonic, and always reaching so hard to be more of both, the film’s most successful moments are mined from the ambient tension between memory and erasure.

Chris, we begin to suspect, would do anything to forget what he’s done, and his own mind is graciously willing to get him halfway there. The rest of the CIA will do anything it takes to make sure that Chris doesn’t share whatever it is that he still remembers. Surrounding them on all sides are statues that predated America by several hundred years, and will likely continue to watch over Rapa Nui long after our empire has been wiped away like a tear in the rain. In “Wild Horse Nine,” American interventionism is less effective as the set-up for some jokes than it is as their punchline.