‘Wild Horse Nine’: John Malkovich Has Never Been Better Than This

Diego Araya Corvalán/Searchlight Pictures John Malkovich is a national treasure whose wily and idiosyncratic personality is tailor-made for both menace and goofiness, and he gets to show off every side of himself in Wild Horse Nine , Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to The Banshees of Inisherin , in which he plays a CIA operative whose wry humor goes hand-in-hand with his casual ruthlessness.

Paired opposite a stellar Sam Rockwell, he delivers one of the great performances of his career, no matter that the film itself isn’t nearly as confident in melding its own disparate registers.

In a basic sense, Wild Horse Nine —premiering Sept.

14 at the Toronto International Film Festival before debuting in theaters on Nov.

6—is a hybrid of Banshees and the writer/director’s 2008 comedic crime thriller In Bruges , concentrating as it does on two professional-killer friends on a remote, picturesque island of rolling hills and scenic ocean views.

The duo in question is Chris (Malkovich) and Lee (Rockwell), central intelligence agency officers stationed in 1973 Chile and working under bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi).

Chris and Lee are close pals, and when the proceedings open, the latter is filming the former discussing his storied covert career, during which he deems each of his clandestine missions a “success”—including one in Dallas.

Chris’ involvement in JFK’s 1963 assassination is teased throughout Wild Horse Nine , whose story follows the pair as they embark on a week-long vacation to Easter Island to see, as Chris puts it, the “heads.” At the airport, Chris is chastised for not using the “indigenous” term for his destination by college students Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas).

With a candor that hardly fits his profession, Chris promptly tells the women that he and Lee are in the country to “destabilize your democracy,” which has just gotten a boost from the election of socialist Salvador Allende.

This is a no-no, but it’s not long before McDonagh reveals the reason for Chris’ inapt big mouth: he’s dying of cancer.

Chris is also a habitual liar who likes to screw with people (believing, at least some of the time, that they won’t buy what he’s selling), and Malkovich establishes him as a stew of contradictions: loyal and deceptive; silly and grim; self-assured and remorseful.

It’s the last of those qualities that comes to the fore in Wild Horse Nine , as Chris and Lee’s sightseeing tour of the island’s “moai” (another indigenous term scoffed at by Malkovich’s protagonist) is colored by omnipresent ruefulness.