Lisa and Rocky’s Wild Horse Nine review says that this dark, off-kilter buddy comedy stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell in some of their best work yet—and that’s really saying something!

At a time when dark and violent spy/special agent/secret service films seem to be relentlessly suffocating the average viewer, Wild Horse Nine arrives in theaters like a welcome breath of fresh air.

The premise is original: two CIA agents walk into a bar on Easter Island… just kidding…almost.

Martin McDonagh’s new film is set in 1973, just before the Chilean coup. It plays out among the giant stone heads, herds of wild horses and a fair amount of CIA subversion. Somewhere in all that, McDonagh finds goings-on that are surprisingly moving and, even better, hilarious.

John Malkovich plays Chris Carlisle, an aging-out agent who simply cannot stop talking, loudly and indiscriminately, about his years at the Agency. Most of those stories are grisly, and he says all the quiet parts out loud. This is a career best for him.

Sam Rockwell is Lee Chesterfield, his exasperated yet bemused partner on this excursion. Steve Buscemi is their boss, who stays behind on the mainland, and the rest of the cast includes Parker Posey, along with the great Tom Waits. It’s a chamber piece, and McDonagh treats it like the stage play he could easily have written.

Wild Horse Nine review — Real life history

The history it’s based on drives the whole film. On September 11, 1973, Chile’s military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. Allende died in the presidential palace as it was attacked, and a long, brutal dictatorship followed.

The United States had spent years working to undermine Allende, and that covert effort was later exposed by declassified documents and a Senate investigation. McDonagh drops us into the uneasy weeks just before the tanks rolled. His two agents are dispatched from Santiago to a remote island, with big events looming just offshore.

The film never lectures. It lets the men’s casual cynicism do the indicting, and the laughter bubbles up in all the right places.

Wild Horse Nine review — Consummate Casting

The casting is a coup in and of itself. Malkovich has been doing career-best work for four decades. He earned Oscar nominations for Places in the Heart and In the Line of Fire, and he won an Emmy for Death of a Salesman. A Steppenwolf Theatre co-founder, he is also unforgettable in Dangerous Liaisons, Empire of the Sun, Con Air, Burn After Reading and, of course, the gloriously meta Being John Malkovich.

As Chris, he is garrulous, infuriating, wounded and weirdly tender, sometimes in the same sentence. He just won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice film festival for it, and the Oscar chatter has already bubbled. I think it’s well deserved.

But Rockwell is award worthy too, as the film’s heart. His role is the less showy one, but the movie doesn’t work without his reactions. He won the Academy Award, Golden Globe, SAG and BAFTA for McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and earned an Oscar nomination for Jojo Rabbit. His résumé runs from Galaxy Quest and The Green Mile to Moon and Seven Psychopaths. He’s also one of my sci-fi favorites for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, where he plays a ragged time traveler barging into a Los Angeles diner with a world-saving mission and no patience for small talk.

Rockwell  brings an unvarnished, loose-limbed energy here, only now he’s the straight man to Malkovich’s runaway train. The two rehearsed for weeks, and it shows. Their bickering feels like decades of marriage without the ring.

Writer/director McDonagh seems to have been born to make this film. The London-born playwright of Irish descent won an Olivier for The Lieutenant of Inishmore and two more for The Pillowman and Hangmen. He won an Oscar for the short Six Shooter before he ever directed a feature.

Then came In Bruges, the hitman comedy that remains a masterclass in tone, followed by Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin. The last of those earned nine Oscar nominations. What binds them all is men who would sooner insult each other than admit they care, and Wild Horse Nine may be his purest expression of that idea. The dialogue sings a raspy tune you can’t get out of your head.

You’ll hear a lot more about this film during awards season, which has already begun. When you see it, you’ll know why.

Canine Critic Rocky’s Review

Rocky agrees with me completely. He found Wild Horse Nine paws-itively fascinating, and says it’s a film with real bite. As for the animals, he gives the herds of wild horses on Easter Island a big woof of approval. They gallop through the frame like they own the place, which, frankly, they do. Now he’s bugging me to take him on a trip to Easter Island, where he can frolic with the horses and those dogs that are always barking in the background. He encourages you to run out and fetch a ticket ASAP.

Rated R

1 Hour 58 Minutes

If this Wild Horse Nine review encourages you to canter on over to the cineplex, find times and tickets at Fandango.com.

Lisa and Rocky’s Wild Horse Nine review says that this dark, off-kilter buddy comedy stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell in some of their best work yet—and that’s really saying something!