Jason Elias

Wildly Familiar: Wild Horse Nine Wild Horse Nine is a solid but familiar Martin McDonagh film. It's well-acted, sharply written in places, and visually striking, it's casual embrace of The JFK assassination conspiracies feels like a needless and tired detour.⁠ Directed and written by McDonagh, the film follows veteran CIA agent Chris Carlisle played by John Malkovich, in one of his strongest recent turns, and his younger partner Lee Chesterfield played by Sam Rockwell who's always a welcome player in any movie, as they visit Santiago in 1973. They are part of the U.S. effort to undermine Salvador Allende’s government ahead of the coup. With Chris dying of cancer and growing loose-lipped, they are sent to Easter Island of Rapa Nui for what is framed as "a final trip." Steve Buscemi plays their anxious handler MJ. The movie mixes dark buddy-comedy banter, melancholy reflections on mortality and male friendship, and a backdrop of real Cold War interventions. Guatemala, Congo, the Bay of Pigs, Chile. The film's core strengths are clear and widely noted. Malkovich and Rockwell have excellent chemistry. McDonagh’s dialogue has its usual snap. The Easter Island landscapes, shot by D.P. Ben Davis, are impressive, and the film effectively blends vulgar humor with a downbeat tone about aging, guilt, and the end of an era, echoing In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin without fully repeating them. The film is not without conventional reservations that keep it from feeling essential. Treading familiar McDonagh ground with two bickering, morally compromised men on a remote island, that tonally shifts between comedy, violence, and sentiment can feel like a grind as it goes along. Supporting characters, especially the women, feel underwritten, the political and historical elements sometimes feel more like backdrop or allegory than fully integrated substance. The JFK conspiracy material is the element of Wild Horse Nine that lands most flatly. Chris is written as having been involved in or present for the assassination, tied to the rifle and Dallas in 1963, and his planned memoir alarms MJ precisely because of this. McDonagh has indicated he leans toward conspiracy. (What a shock) It seems like that is a law if you're a director in Hollywood. The film treats the idea as one more item on Chris’s long list of operations, sometimes with a wry or jokey air alongside more documented interventions. It feels like an unnecessary employment of an already endlessly mythologized American obsession grafted onto a story that already has stronger, more grounded historical anchors in Chile and elsewhere. Decades after Oliver Stone’s JFK and countless others, returning to the “CIA/lone-gunman is a cover” framing, even as flavor text or character color, has an especially wearying quality. It doesn’t deepen the portrait of institutional violence or Chris’s moral accounting so much as recycle a familiar, contested narrative that has long since outlived any fresh dramatic or creative insight. Jesus Christ will the completely ignoring of Lee Harvey Oswald just continue forever? Wild Horse Nine is watchable for the performances and dialogue, and moments of black comedy and melancholy, however fleeting. But the JFK angle is a predictable, low-effort choice that undercuts the film’s better instincts and underscores how persistently some filmmakers reach for that particular conspiracy even when the rest of the material doesn’t require it. Wild Horse Nine is neither a triumph nor a failure, just a competent McDonagh picture weighed down by one especially stale choice. Note to Filmmakers: If you want to stand out from the crowd and actually be edgy, make a film that isn't pro-conspiracy. That would actually be wild. -RWII

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