Wild Horse Nine (2026 | USA | 118 minutes | Martin McDonagh)
Among the places one could go to die, there are precious few nicer than Easter Island, with the giant heads and everything.
After a long career destabilizing governments at home and abroad, CIA operative Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) has received a terminal cancer diagnosis and knows he has fewer days ahead than behind. The 1973 coup that ousted democratically elected Marxist Salvador Allende and installed the ruthless, CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet is going to be Carlisle’s swan song. He’s been the Leonard Zelig of political assassinations for over a generation, but not even Kissinger lived forever.
Such is the essence of the hilarious new absurdist comedy Wild Horse Nine, the latest from director Martin McDonagh.
After completing their assignment in Santiago, Chris and his protégé Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) take a detour to Easter Island with the understanding that this will be Chris’s final stop. Maybe it’s the young, idealistic college students they meet at the airport, maybe it’s the morphine, but Chris becomes philosophical and decides to record his memoirs on a Dictaphone. Chris and Lee’s boss MJ (Steve Buscemi) very much wants Chris to ix-nay on the Allas-day 1963-ay stuff and tasks Lee with stopping him.
The bond between Chris and Lee is the centerpiece of the film. Lee obviously reveres Chris, but he’s also a company man, and remaining loyal to a dying operative who’s proving to be a loose cannon carries enormous risk. It’s not made any easier by both Chris and MJ asking Lee to kill Chris.
Malkovich is what holds this movie together, and I’m not sure it would work with another actor delivering the same lines. Anyone who has seen Burn After Reading or Being John Malkovich know that he has excellent comedic timing. But those of us lucky enough to have seen him perform The Music Critic, where he delivers brutal lines from actual reviews of some of history’s most celebrated composers, have witnessed his genius for deadpan absurdity.
McDonagh’s dialogue is consistently sharp, save for one clumsy bit of editorializing about why the assassination of an American president on American soil attracted more attention than the various foreign leaders Chris has helped dispatch. Plus, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder at one man accusing another of being a junkie.
It’s a bleak, frequently absurd film that somehow manages to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen this year.
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Wild Horse Nine opens in theaters today, October 30, 2026.