[Editor’s note: This review was originally published on September 3, 2026 during the 2026 Venice Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, November 6.]
Another silly Martin McDonagh talks about a pair of murderers who go on a boy’s journey to purgatory (where they search their souls while waiting for death to find them), the painful but unforgettable “Wild Horse Nine” sequences to translate the post-Guy Ritchie bark of “In Bruges” into the classic American Western language. In this case, American Western was set on Easter Island and behind it with the rise of Augusto Pinochet to power in the fall of 1973.
McDonagh’s decision to remake his same old script against the backdrop of such a real and horrific event gives this new scale a welcome feel, both in terms of the morality of his characters, as well as their greater place in history. But that decision is a double-edged sword that cuts the film off at the knees. Where “In Bruges” began with the killing of a fictional altar boy, “Wild Horse Nine” is occupied by the deaths of thousands upon thousands of real people, and that reality seeps into the edges of the frame even when the seriocomic absence of McDonagh’s writing calls for a world of real invention.
Does the overlap make “Wild Horse Nine” feel glib? Yes, and thank God for that – if not for glibness the film would lose most of its few laughs. The problem is that it also makes “Wild Horse Nine” feel like the obvious 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 a confession. In contrast, I find it hard to believe that a former CIA agent who openly brags about his involvement in Kennedy’s assassination would have a come-to-Jesus moment after the disappearance of Salvador Allende. McDonagh is having a good time wrestling whether we should or not care about such a big change of heart, but the point is delivered gradually in a film whose emotions are less believable than its conspiracies.
The company’s original man, Chris (John Malkovich, more locked in than he’s been on screen since “Burn After Reading”) is a natural hinge for the unabashed comedy that McDonagh builds around him, as he can be a joy to watch even when you don’t buy a word he says. More than just an ordinary CIA agent, he is the living personification of America’s efforts to overthrow foreign governments throughout the 20th century. He was close to Patrice Lumumba until the day the Congolese leader was executed by firing squad. He was in Cuba to give a boost to the refugees who didn’t overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961. He was even in Dallas, USA on a Friday afternoon in November 1963, doing favorite things with his ornery boss MJ (Steve Buscemi) that he didn’t tell you about.
He traveled to all these places, and found all these people killed, with the cruelty of a flag waving in the wind. Chris says he’s killed 68 people in his career, and he offers that information as easily as a rumor – in a way that makes it seem like the number could be half that, or double, and it wouldn’t make a difference.
More recently, the fate of Chris and his office man/platonic life partner/frustrated suitor Lee (McDonagh vet Sam Rockwell) down south to Chile, where the two have been hard at work organizing a September 11 coup against a democratically elected socialist president, knowing full well that it would lead the country to decades of a brutal dictatorship. Chris seems to enjoy causing chaos, and the fact that he manages to wear a cute little Panama hat while doing it only adds to his energy. the joy of life.
But Chris is cracking at the seams in ways we don’t see at first – ways that only begin to reveal themselves when he and Lee decide to celebrate their imminent success with a tourist trip to Easter Island, just 2,300 miles off the west coast of Santiago. There are still a few months to go before the coup, but the wheels are in motion, and these men have little to do now besides fly to Rapa Nui, look at the “big heads,” flirting with a couple of beautiful young leftists (the most precious but beautiful one played by the talented “Ema” Mariana di Girolamo), and the nervous feeling will soon reflect on their role in Pinochet. his own people. That task is complicated and confusing because Chris seems to be losing his memory, which puts Lee in the role of his frivolous but loving caretaker.
“Wild Horse Nine” is only the second feature ever to be shot on the ultra-remote terrain of Rapa Nui (Kevin Reynolds’ 1994 epic “Rapa Nui” is credited as the first), and McDonagh is rightly exalted because he has brought Hollywood to the end of the world. The first half of his film largely sticks to the fiction that Chris and Lee are just on Easter Island to go around, which gives us a semi-relaxed chance to take in the scenes. Ben Davis’ sun-drenched cinematography gives the mountains and beaches of Rapa Nui a veneer of lost image, the ancient beautiful images assumed to be especially sacred when contrasted with unnatural characters.
Chris laughs at the images with ethnographic glee, mocking one of the shorter figures as a dwarf (in case the “In Bruges” déjà vu wasn’t strong enough already), but he’s clearly shaken by the fact that some of them are almost 750 years old. That they have stood there as a silent tribute to the ancestors of Polynesia as empires rose and fell on distant shores, each of them a graveyard of forgotten people just like himself. By the same token, it is equally clear that he is trying to get at something in his own mind as he and Lee listen to Judy Collins in their rental car, arguing whether or not any Nazis made it to heaven (among other even more aggressively screen-written topics), and whispering sweetly to the wild horses that run around the island, but the special nature of that thing is hard for him to pin down.
Malkovich is having the time of his life with that search for the last speck of Chris’s humanity, which shines from the bottom of her soul as his mind continues to grow. At the same time both at the same time calm and also choked with Catholic guilt, Malkovich’s performance marries the unfairness of a shepherd with the paranoia of a bounty target. One minute he’s reciting poetry about dinosaurs, the next he’s shaking his backpack with explosives (probably) and checking the “Memento”-like reminder notes he’s slipped into his jacket pocket.
“Wild Horse Nine” loves Chris too much to pretend we don’t deserve it, but Malkovich never asks for our sympathy because he knows he’ll get it anyway, and not just because Rockwell’s character’s purpose is to make sure we do. Chris’ job is to make rooting for the bad guys feel like the right choice. This is the cornerstone of American foreign policy after the war.
So while Chris may be cut from the same cloth as John Wayne (to the extent that Monument Valley is revealed as a place of great importance to him), his arc focuses on the opposite side of the one that Ethan Edwards follows over “The Searchers”; Chris is very involved in this film gradually transitioning into a crazy hero, and while it’s all too easy to root for him to complete that transformation before time runs out, “Wild Horse Nine” doesn’t quite sell us on the idea that he’ll mean anything in the end – even for him.
Fortunately, the film is not Catholic enough to offer Chris a great moment of divine experience; instead of building up to a big confession, he and Lee are just running from their top CIA ranks to turn the PTO into an American national security issue. Guns are fired. Hosts are accepted. The word “fuck” is used as a punctuation mark, and regrets are thrown into the wind long after any way for them to matter.
It all gets a little too busy and too busy as “Wild Horse Nine” — underwhelming even in its most spectacular bits, as is McDonagh’s way — struggles to make up for the general listlessness of its first half. Ever as funny as it is sardonic, and always reaching so hard to be more of both, the film’s most successful moments are built from the ambient tension between memory and erasure.
Chris, we begin to suspect, would do anything to forget what he did, and his own mind is graciously prepared to take him half way there. The rest of the CIA will do whatever it takes to make sure Chris doesn’t share anything he still remembers. Surrounding them on both sides are images that predated America by several hundred years, and will likely continue to watch over Rapa Nui long after our empire has been swept away like tears in the water. In “Wild Horse Nine,” American intervention is less effective as the setting of some joke than as the punch line.
Grade: B-
“Wild Horse Nine” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, November 6.