Wild Horse Nine John Malkovich review, Digi Mart USA News: What does it mean that three of John Malkovich’s finest performances have him playing CIA agents? Probably something about the 72-year-old actor’s ability to convey a malevolent feeling of secrecy, the covert glee of a private joker who knows exactly what he’s packing up his sleeve.
The same sense of rueful interiority that once prompted Charlie Kaufman to use Malkovich as a portal to the theme of psychic compartmentalization makes him well suited to characters who contain multitudes and are inured to living and working in deep cover.
It’s a fine line between tradecraft and sociopathy. If there’s a common denominator between the unhinged sniper in In the Line of Fire and the disillusioned spooks of Burn After Reading and Wild Horse Nine, it’s their alienated patriotism: an all-American sense of duty bound up in soul-deadening bureaucracy and defined by a license to kill.
“Don’t pull rank on me,” snarls Malkovich’s veteran ratfucker, Chris Carlisle, to partner Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) during one of the many spats dotting Wild Horse Nine. “I’ve killed people in countries you can’t even spell.”
That punch line, pithy, misanthropic and defined by a prideful sense of one-upsmanship, is vintage Martin McDonagh. With this in mind, Wild Horse Nine, which earned Malkovich the Best Actor prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival and is being touted as a possible vehicle for one of those unofficial lifetime achievement Oscars, is a victory lap over familiar territory for both its maker and its headliner.
McDonagh’s movies are filled with words and focused on characters who are always trying to get the last one in, sometimes by shouting the loudest, sometimes by bumping off their conversation partners before they get a chance to retort. His best mixture of verbal and literal pyrotechnics remains 2008’s In Bruges, about a pair of tetchy hit men, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, bickering their way through various standoffs in a remote and self-contained location.
2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin repeated its predecessor’s setup and casting, minus the gunplay and with a surfeit of glistening and gloomy Emerald Isle melancholy. The film was slight and familiar but affecting all the same, buoyed by the marvelous rapport between its leads.
Farrell and Gleeson are nowhere to be found in Wild Horse Nine, but aspects of both Bruges and Banshees hover over its tale of far-flung frenemies hashing out matters of life and death; it effectively completes its creator’s Dudes Talk trilogy.
