Nag nag nag: "Wild Horse Nine"

After 2022's widely admired The Banshees of Inisherin, writer-director Martin McDonagh reverts to playing the hits. Wild Horse Nine centres on two white male malcontents abroad, bickering and busting one another's balls in the wider absence of anything more constructive to do. In this variation, they're a pair of CIA agents being flown out of Allende's Chile and deposited on the altogether more absurd territory of Rapa Nui - or Easter Island, as these thoroughly unreconstructed reprobates insist on referring to it. Unbeknownst to them, they're being put out to pasture, partly for knowing too much about previous American interventions in other countries' internal affairs, partly as punishment for failing to bring about the Chilean coup that will subsequently take place, initiated by more ruthless (and doubtless less chatty) operatives. And there's something else going on besides: the older of the two agents, first heard with a Movie Cough that may or may not be linked to his continual smoking, is keen to set the record straight on his time with the Agency by writing and publishing a memoir. The question this raises is whether the younger of the two has been sent this way as a means of managing his wayward travelling companion, or to walk a potential whistleblower towards a premature grave. For the time being, though, they sit and talk, sniping predominantly at each other, with their hapless hosts and innocent bystanders catching the odd verbal stray. I should at this point establish that the leads are played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, and therefore have a whole arsenal of tricks at their disposal to catch and retain the interest of those viewers who might otherwise feel somewhat queasy about being asked to care about - and maybe even root for - murderous functionaries of the State. One of the hits McDonagh is replaying here is the generation of sympathy for old devils, previously undertaken in 2008's In Bruges, where the heroes were stone-cold contract killers, and 2017's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a defining film of the Trump 1.0 era, where Rockwell made off with an armful of awards for playing Best Supporting Racist.

As encores go, Wild Horse Nine feels like a naggingly slight return, all told. Banshees, rightly, was acclaimed for its inherent soulfulness, its thoughtful gestures towards some diagnosis of How Men Are. (It made sense that the image of the Barry Keoghan character lamenting the death of a dream became a meme: there was a moment that meant so much more than just a director cramming ribald words into an actor's mouth.) This follow-up can be funny, in a glib way: Malkovich's breakfast-table spiel on the relationship between democracy, gayness and cheese has the much-workshopped air of a bit in an anti-woke stand-up's Netflix special. But even when it's funny, the film feels heartless, a bit of a coast for a director more than ever in love with his own writing. This is the project that confirms McDonagh as Tarantinoid in his default mode of expression: surfacey, posturing, determined to make flinty dialogue the entire show. You can still see why expert performers are drawn this way, but the rewards now seem less substantial. Casting director Sarah Halley Finn pulls off a coup of her own in landing Tom Waits for one (good, lived-in) scene as Malkovich's estranged brother - eccentricity runs in this family, clearly - but Parker Posey is wasted as Rockwell's philandering wife, a sour-joke character who doesn't even merit a punchline, and Steve Buscemi is left to trade in one-note crabbiness as the agents' junkie boss. It's all about the central double-act, this time: two vaguely different but essentially similar men, underlining the narrowness of this worldview. One Malkovich aside on protesting ("If you're not going to get what you're marching for, you may as well stay in bed") suggests McDonagh was aiming to chime with the overriding cynicism of the second Trump administration; if I Love Boosters, with its openness to societal and diegetic change, felt like the perfect release for the week of the 2026 midterms, Wild Horse Nine presents as the diametric opposite. Gone is Banshees' finely worked balance between the profoundly funny and the profoundly sad; in its place, a wobbly melancholy, tipping over into outright morbidity. Its organising image is that of a horse left to die in the road, while its theme and sensibility are summarised by one Buscemi tirade: "Life's sad. Everything's sad. That's why I take so much smack." For their part, Malkovich and Rockwell are eminently capable of replaying the hits: they're too wily not to feast on dialogue such as this (viz. the meal the former makes of the term "cahoots"). But there's too little difference between the Malkovich character when he's on morphine and when he's off it, and it struck me as revealing indeed that the film should end with the character worrying whether critics will find his suicide note overly verbose. These actors can give individual lines and scenes a lift, but they can't give Wild Horse Nine anything more than the most resigned and pessimistic idea of life: McDonagh has already given it nowhere to go but the grave.

Wild Horse Nine is now showing in cinemas nationwide.