“It’s a fairytale f***ing town, isn’t it? How can a fairytale town not be somebody’s f***ing thing?” So thundered Ralph Fiennes’s Harry in Martin McDonagh’s 2008 black comedy In Bruges, confounded at the thought that someone might be indifferent to the quaint charms of medieval Belgium. McDonagh’s latest work, Wild Horse Nine, dispatches another pair of professional killers to an idyllic holiday destination for a final sendoff. The film is wonderfully funny and unexpectedly moving, a tribute to life, male friendship — and, depending on your sympathies, the CIA.
It is 1973, and CIA agents Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) are stationed in Chile, where Salvador Allende’s Marxist government is living on borrowed time. Their bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), sends them to Easter Island, ostensibly for a respite from toppling socialists. For Chris, who is dying of cancer, the trip offers a chance to see the island’s celebrated stone statues — the “big heads,” as he insists on calling them — before his time runs out.
