Adelaide Film Festival headliner Wild Horse Nine is mordantly funny, if overly familiar

CIA agents Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are unambiguously awful people working for an unambiguously awful force of colonial violence in Wild Horse Nine, the latest feature from The Banshees of Inisherin filmmaker Martin McDonagh.

Enjoying its Australian premiere as the opening night gala of this year’s Adelaide Film Festival before opening nationally on 5 November, it’s very much in McDonagh’s morally murky comedy mould.

These amoral men think nothing of eating a burger while ending a life from a sniper’s calculated distance – or close enough for a gunshot to the temple. This, while conversely thinking far too much about whether the type of cheese a nation favours makes it inherently gay, or whether there are dinosaurs in heaven.

Chris is a dinosaur, but one might guess he’s very much on his way to the bad place. Having killed enough people for it to no longer register, he’s a husk in lieu of a soul, even if I do sympathise with his caring more for horses than humans.

If you’re prone to viewing the world through a karmic lens, Chris is paying for his cold, dead-hearted actions. Cancer proliferates within him, necessitating self-administered injections of morphine to ease the pain.

Dementia likewise eats at his mind, obscuring the dark annals of his international assassination efforts, as the CIA blithely topples democracies in favour of asserting US-led capitalistic dominance. His pockets are stuffed with notes reminding him that he is dying, and that he shouldn’t trust Lee.

Call me

As his long-suffering wingman, Lee has a lower kill count, though Chris argues he’s less respectful in his methods, as if an oblivious corpse cares either way. Lee is still, as the Americans say, an asshole.

Similarly untroubled by their trigger-happy political interference, though certainly more circumspect about shouting the details on planes and hotel dining rooms than Chris. He’s also an absentee father and husband, with Parker Posey as his stereotypically soused shrew of a wife, Margie.

Stealing the entire film with naught but a handful of on-the-phone check-ins, Margie’s magnificently venomous, spitting slick disses his way while casually dropping a litany of other men callers in her argy-bargy with Lee. While a well-spent cameo rocks, I do wish we’d seen more of her. Instead, her more animated sub-plot is dropped as soon as it’s introduced. 

Steve Buscemi gets a little bit more to do as the men’s cantankerous CIA handler, MJ. All three are stationed in Santiago in 1973, with the insidious intent of assassinating President Salvador Allende, the first elected Marxist. An event we know occurred on 11 September, a date that will come to haunt the US.

Incriminating tapes

But Chris has had it with MJ – and the CIA more broadly. Keenly aware of his rapid shuffle along the mortal coil, he’s implored Lee to take him to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and the ‘Big heads’ (Moai) before having his grudgingly reluctant partner execute him.

It’s at the airport that the men encounter two rather underwritten Chilean friends Alicia (Ailín Salas) and Monica (Mariana Di Girolamo). While both are charismatic screen presences, they’re given short shrift. Like Christopher Nolan, McDonagh isn’t overly interested in the interiority of women. Di Girolamo is somewhat sloppily saddled with being the listening ear to Chris’ rollcall of regrets.

He has a few, and he’s not afraid to share. Recording his memoir on dictaphones, they’re stuffed with juicy goss on the agency’s involvement in JFK’s assassination. A fact that has MJ frothing, threatening Lee’s family if he doesn’t off his partner and secure the tapes, which include Chris’ musing, in a rare moment of empathy for others, that you kill one white president and the world loses its mind, while any number of people of colour are fair game.

This broadside would land better if McDonagh weren’t so wedded to a lazy, punch-down recurring ‘joke’ at the expense of the word ‘Indigenous’ that feels both anachronistic – as does the gay cheese stuff – and just plain ugly. These may be bad men and films don’t have to be moral, but there’s a whiff of Tarantino’s egregious overuse of the N-word.

Archival material of the murdered Patrice Lumumba, inaugural prime minister of the then First Congolese Republic, underlines the point a little clumsily. While we get the parallels with the US/Israeli assaults on Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine and more, there’s not a great deal of depth to the interrogation of imperialism.

Watch the trailer

Familiar territory

McDonagh’s writing here isn’t as sharp or sorrowful as Inisherin, nor as politically acute, with WiId Horse Nine also feeling like a bit of a retread of In Bruges. While Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson best this film’s stars, there is great chemistry between Malkovich and Rockwell.

The former was lauded with the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice, but I’d argue that it’s Rockwell that does the more subtly impressive work here, in a film not dabbling too much in subtlety. Malkovich’s overly laconic, mumbling performance, however word-weary, is a little too turgid, rendering the film a bit flat.

That said, their explosively lobbed banter is wildly amusing, and cinematographer Ben Davis maximises the location work with an eye for sunlight dappled through swaying long grass, and the preternatural calm of a blinking horse.

If McDonagh’s emotional climax feels a tad manipulatively unearned, Wild Horse Nine is still worth your time if you like crumpled-in-every-way guys lobbing verbal grenades at one another. These irksomely amusing assholes mutually deserve it.

Wild Horse Nine releases in cinemas on 5 November.

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