Martin McDonagh is back with Wild Horse Nine, a new film that begins in 1973 in Santiago, Chile, and sends two hit men toward Easter Island for a week. John Malkovich plays Chris Carlisle, a longtime C.I.A. operative who says he played a prominent role in the Kennedy assassination and now wants Lee Chesterfield to help hasten his death.
The setup gives the film its immediate pull: Chris is dying of cancer, but he keeps talking like a man on a lark, the kind of debonair mouth that can make even a death wish sound like a joke. Sam Rockwell plays Chesterfield, while Steve Buscemi appears as M.J., the C.I.A.'s South American bureau chief, and Parker Posey plays Chesterfield's wife.
That mix is exactly where McDonagh has made his name. Wild Horse Nine sits in the same lane as In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin, pairing profane dialogue with bloody buddy-comedy energy and a crime story that keeps veering toward grief. Malkovich's casting matters too, because the film leans on the memory of his turn as Booth in In the Line of Fire, where he played a killer trained by the C.I.A. and menaced a president with lines about the rifle coming out of a window and Kennedy's head being blown apart.
The friction inside Wild Horse Nine is hard to miss. Chris jokes about having toppled leaders across Guatemala and Congo, then turns around and reaches for the crudest possible line about a wife; the character's swagger is part of the joke, but it also makes his illness feel even uglier and more final. McDonagh is using that clash to keep the film from settling into one note, and the remote island setting only sharpens the isolation.
What happens once Carlisle and Chesterfield reach Easter Island is the unanswered part, and that is where the film will live or die. For now, the promise is clear: McDonagh has taken his taste for violence, guilt and dark laughs and dropped it into a story about a man who wants the end on his own terms.
