Perhaps the biggest early premiere of this year’s Venice Film Festival, Wild Horse Nine may be first out of the gate in drumming up some awards buzz.
The latest from Banshees of Inisherin and In Bruges writer-director Martin McDonagh finds another duo of mismatched fellas butting heads, bantering, and reflecting on the lives they’ve lived. This time, it’s a couple of CIA agents played by two-time Academy Award nominee John Malkovich and one-time Oscar winner Sam Rockwell.
The first waves of reviews for Wild Horse Nine range from middling to generally positive, with the highest praise saved for Malkovich, who is likely to find himself in the Best Actor conversation in the next coming months. Based on the handful of initial critiques, Wild Horse Nine holds an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; its Metacritic score is pending due to an insufficient number of reviews.
“Not typically the most emotionally demonstrative of actors, [Malkovich] doesn’t stray far outside his dry, laconic wheelhouse in this drolly melancholic tale of two ugly Americans in a Chile on the cusp of military rule, reckoning with the fascistic influence of their presence and past, and with terminal disease besides,” writes Guy Lodge for Variety. “But as a veteran spy f–king the system as he stares death in the face, Malkovich — in his first collaboration with the writer-director — gives McDonagh’s pithy, tangy dialogue just the sad, soulful eccentricity that it needs to live off the page. Where the film, enjoyable and puckish as ever, gets just a little too neat, the actor’s hoarsely wounded, seen-it-all performance untidies things a little.”
Stuck between all of the praise for Malkovich, however, is a repeated refrain that “seen-it-all” could also describe the critics, who can’t seem to help point out that the plot is somewhat of a retread for McDonagh — and one that may be lacking the emotional believability of previous examples.
“I can accept that an inexperienced hitman might have a dark night of the soul after shooting an innocent child during confession,” writes David Ehrlich for IndieWire. “By contrast, I struggle to believe that a veteran CIA agent who openly brags about his involvement in the Kennedy assassination would have a come-to-Jesus moment after orchestrating the demise of Salvador Allende. McDonagh has some good fun wrestling with whether or not we should care about such a mottled change of heart, but the point is gradually rendered moot in a movie whose emotions are less credible than its conspiracies.”
Other critics, however, are more than happy to go on another ride.
“Wild Horse Nine is another memorable addition to McDonagh’s distinctive body of work and a late-career high for Malkovich, whose knack for hiding and revealing his character’s feelings at the same time makes Chris an uncommonly thoughtful antihero,” writes David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter.
The overall impression that the first wave of reviews leave is that Malkovich is doing some of his best work in years, the rest of the ensemble of steady hands also deliver, and McDonagh is doing his (often very funny and entertaining) thing again.
“There are some laughs here, and some lively moments, but persistent, slightly jarring violent flourishes inevitably coexist with sentimentality — although that sentimentality might not erase the audience’s concern about a certain situation concerning Lee’s wife and kids, whose well-being at the end seems to be heartlessly forgotten about,” writes Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Not a McDonagh classic, but some nice riffing from Rockwell and Malkovich.”
