Γουάιλντ Χορς Νάιν

𝐉4.5

It's like In Bruges but in the 70s on Easter Island

Matt Neglia4.5

I’ve never cried during a Martin McDonagh film before, but WILD HORSE NINE was the first one to get me there due to the outstanding performances from Sam Rockwell & especially John Malkovich. Some of McDonagh’s most reflective, mature and emotional work on regret, mortality, loyalty, and friendship in a destabilized, sad, lonely little world. I wish Mariana di Girolamo had just a little more to do but what she does have, she certainly makes a strong impression. The dark laughs are still there (Many of Rockwell’s cutaway shots are comedic gold) but the pathos that Malkovich brings to this role represents a career-best from an actor who has given us so many great performances but this is the one that will long stay with me. Maybe not my favorite McDonagh overall but very, very good.Check out Josh Parham’s full review on NextBestPicture.com here

davidehrlich3.0

Another melancholically splenetic Martin McDonagh jag about a banter-mad pair of murderers who go on a boys trip to purgatory (where they search their souls as they wait for death to find them), the prickly but unconvincing “Wild Horse Nine” strains to translate the post-Guy Ritchie bark of “In Bruges” into the language of a classic American Western. In this case, an American Western set on Easter Island and backdropped by Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power in the fall of 1973. McDonagh’s decision to recast his same old script against the backdrop of such a real and terrible event grants this new telling a welcome sense of scale, both in terms of its characters’ morality, as well as in regards to their greater place in history. But that decision is a double-edged sword that cuts the film off at the knees. Where “In Bruges” kicked off with the killing of a fictional altar boy, “Wild Horse Nine” is overshadowed by the deaths of thousands upon thousands of very real people, and that reality bleeds into the edges of the frame even when the seriocomic absurdity of McDonagh’s writing demands a world of pure invention.Does the overlap make “Wild Horse Nine” feel glib? Yes, and thank god for that — if not for glibness the movie would lose the majority of its few solid laughs. The problem is that it also makes “Wild Horse Nine” feel as transparently manufactured as the CIA-backed overthrow of a foreign democracy. I can accept that an inexperienced hitman might have a dark night of the soul after shooting an innocent child during confession. 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. ~this review continues on IndieWire~