The trailer for Wild Horse Nine looks like nothing more than a parody of Martin McDonagh’s well-established and celebrated style. “How many times did the line about killing a guy in/spelling Czechoslovakia have to play during World Cup hydration breaks before you lost it?” is the new “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” Yet no matter how much confidence the trailers instilled in its potential tedium, Wild Horse Nine is anything but derivative, tedious, kitschy, unfunny, or phoned-in. It is, in a way, exactly what you’re expecting, exactly what’s advertised. But as always, McDonagh delivers as effectively as ever, proving that fame and filmmaking success haven’t diluted his artistry at all.
Chris and Lee have been partners in CIA crime for some time. Lee (Sam Rockwell) is a bit newer to the game, far from a young buck but just as far from the credit Chris (John Malkovich) has built over the years. Chris is a coup d’etat roi, royalty among the CIA’s global counterinsurgence. He was involved in the President Árbenz overthrow that effectively ended the Guatemalan Revolution for democracy in 1954. He played a significant role in Cuba on behalf of the CIA in 1960 and again in ‘61 for the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He went to Dallas for work on November 22, 1963.
In short, the two—as Chris puts it to a couple unsuspecting Chilean socialists in the airport—destabilize democracies at the behest of the US government. It’s February 1973 in Santiago, where the hitmen are posted up for the very same reason. By the time they’re making their way to Easter Island, a couple thousand miles off the coast of Chile, the Pinochet-led coup d’etat has already been set for September 11. For now, the assassins’ work is done and, inseparable partners as they are, they vacation to the Indigenously named Rapa Nui.
That it has an Indigenous name at all feverishly pisses Chris off. A smug, blatantly pro-fascist instigator, organizer, and action-taker, Chris has a minor panic attack about the rise of liberalism every time he hears the word “Indigenous” without some plan of sabotage attached. He’s an openly despicable character. But McDonagh’s trick is to charm you with him just as plainly, to paint Chris in endearing light and relatable shadow. For one, he’s hilarious in an egregiously outdated kind of way—much like the average highly opinionated, socially detached, conservative dad is to anyone who understands the proliferated type. For another, he speaks with a respectable candor and isn’t always talking politics. McDonagh’s existential edge is sharp as ever in Chris’ universal meditations. Third, he’s dying of cancer, which means he’s doing a lot of meditating.
Much like Malkovich did as the CIA-employed Osborne Cox in Burn After Reading, Chris reflectively records his memoirs, this time with death on the horizon. He seems pretty snappy, so it’s hard to imagine he’ll be gone soon, but context clues suggest otherwise. Regardless, Chris doesn’t want to suffer through a fight with cancer. He doesn’t remember doing it, but he actually asked Lee if they could go to Easter Island so Lee could kill him peacefully without the threat of an Easter Island police force investigating the “murder.” Needless to say, Lee is conflicted (and devastated) by this request.
Over Lee’s shoulder, CIA supervisor MJ (Steve Buscemi) constantly pries for information about one particular moment in Chris’ career: what happened to the rifle that killed JFK? As far as anyone knows, Chris was the one responsible for providing and disposing of it, but MJ suspects he still has the weapon and wants Lee to figure out where it is before Chris dies. In other words: he wants Lee to listen to Chris’ memoirs. As if two brash bestie hitmen hiding out in a remote place for any reason isn’t enough, to make things even more In Bruges, MJ tells Lee to kill Chris as soon as he gets the information.
McDonagh’s fifth feature drills his main thematic interests into the ground. It marks his third about men who are best friends at each other’s throats, and the beauty and difficulty of male friendship in the conflicting face of work, evolving personalities, and social rejection. On top of In Bruges and Banshees of Inisherin, Wild Horse Nine also contains traces of Memento and the “Dying for Pie” episode of SpongeBob SquarePants—a fascinating, folksy (thanks to a tender score from Carter Burwell), and distinctly McDonagh type of tale. Chris’ fading memory means he has to leave notes to himself to remember things in the future, even if he’s not sure when or why he wrote them (e.g. “Don’t trust Lee!”). And the movie inches closer and closer to the SpongeBob premise of a friend carrying a bomb who might explode at any moment, large walls and in-fields reminiscing included.
The minutiae of Malkovich’s character bring another film to mind: In the Line of Fire, a 1993 Wolfgang Petersen picture in which Clint Eastwood plays a Secret Service agent trying to stop a deranged assassin from killing the President. Eastwood’s motivations: his obsession with the JFK assassination he couldn’t stop. The assassin? John Malkovich. His background? A former, unruly CIA agent.
McDonagh wryly and dryly makes a joke of the CIA—more broadly, all US intelligence agencies—a reality that becomes truer by the minute in contemporary circumstances but has perhaps always been the case, simply with better dressing to dissuade the public in the past. He’s clearly intelligent, but Chris’ ideological looseness and social laxity surrounding some of the most prominently awful moments in mid-century American and world history suggests a dimwitted mob mentality behind the CIA’s highest-ranking agents, a cold inhumanity, a violent self-interest that guides the agency, and an ulterior motivation that is, at best, fear-mongering, if not outright totalitarian.
On the matter of authority: it’s mere minutes until we’re in a Catholic church, per the director’s usual. And while we won’t be here very often in Wild Horse Nine, McDonagh establishes the juxtaposition between two antithetical concepts—killing for pay/politics and the Christian faith—as quickly as he does with In Bruges or The Banshees of Inisherin. Like Schrader or Scorsese, the London-born Irish filmmaker has maintained a career obsession with ushering not just the spiritual but the spiritual discipline of everyday faith and religious devotion into the recognizable worlds he imagines. And, as with Schrader and Bresson, he stirs up the soul with his dense, deft theological theme work, leaving the audience whispering questions to themselves—that they’ve no doubt shouted into the ether a million times unanswered—with a fresh sense of meaning.
The screenwriter side of McDonagh is still in pristine form—part Larry David, part David Mamet, part Coen brothers, part Samuel Beckett. That’s not to say McDonagh’s directing instincts have lost their way, but the playwright-turned-screenwriter has always been a scribe first and filmmaker second. His direction is merely a vehicle for what’s on the page, and what’s on the page has been so consistently brilliant over his 20-year film career (despite six nominations, he won his only Oscar for his debut short Six Shooter in 2006) that half of the job directing is just getting out of the way so the screenplay can speak for itself. As such, McDonagh does a terrific job both directing his talent toward the script and spotlighting it with a stylistically simple approach.
Bits about the relationship between democracy, gayness, and the existence of cheese in a given country, cancer-sniffing horses, the political effectiveness of shooting people, and bosses shooting smack sit among some of McDonagh’s funniest moments to date. And it comes as no surprise that regular collaborator Rockwell and first-timer Malkovich pull just the right dialogic punches. If there’s anything to push back on, it’s the well-worn territory of it all. But so long as McDonagh keeps cranking them out at this level, each one feels new, granting him carte blanche to tell the story of guys being buds until he retires.
Wild Horse Nine premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and will open on November 6.
The post Venice Review: Wild Horse Nine Is a Ruthless CIA Spoof with Shades of Memento and SpongeBob Squarepants first appeared on The Film Stage.
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