Sunday, November 15, 2026

Wild Horse Nine (dir. Martin McDonagh, 2026)

In Wild Horse Nine, John Malkovich gives us the best and most self-aware cinematic performance of the past decade, perhaps even of the past two decades. I’m hoping that at the 2027 Oscars ceremony, in a flashback to the infamous restaurant scene from Being John Malkovich, the presenters all trot out 24 different John Malkoviches to receive not only his own very long overdue first Academy Award for Best Actor, but to let those various versions of Malkovich accept every single Oscar awarded that night. His performance is that consummate and that good; nobody else could have done it, and nobody else will ever again do anything that’s exactly like it. I have a lot to say about him in the film, though the movie’s narrative itself (about two CIA hitmen portrayed by Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, and the events leading up to the conservative military coup that initiated the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile in 1973…plus, lots of playful and surreal imagery surrounding the ancient indigenous “Big Heads” on Easter Island) honestly could be swapped out pretty seamlessly with any number of other similar storylines. While this one does work for the purposes of writer/director Martin McDonagh’s hilarious and highly intelligent screenplay, it's also clear that everything in the film was crafted around Malkovich’s quietly towering embodiment of a smoothly cantankerous, devoutly Catholic man who talks to wild horses and is dying of cancer, a physical curse that hasn’t at all diminished his legendary marksmanship skills, which the film cheekily suggests may actually have nixed John F. Kennedy as well.

I’d also advocate for adding a 25th Oscar to the 2027 lineup of categories with a single nominee: Malkovich and Rockwell for Best On-Screen Chemistry. Their riotously chattery banter is totally irresistible (which, second to Malkovich himself, is the main reason why I’m currently on my sixth viewing of the film, with a seventh coming up this coming week), and in flashes it’s just as moving as it is knock-down hilarious, with so many asides and muttered half-moments whispered under their breath that the film easily sustains that many viewings, and probably even twice as many. The best scenes, arguably, are when the two unlikeliest yet still entirely believable hitmen in film history (I mean, who would be less capable of killing anybody than John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell?) spar and face off several times with the equally unlikeliest of adversaries: two young Chilean left-wing activist women (or at least one of them is), flawlessly played by Mariana di Girolamo and Ailin Salas. Any number of these four superb performances could and should be lauded during awards season.

This makes the handling of the film’s more minor characters a bit puzzling, to be honest, though they’re expertly inhabited by seasoned actors despite being given relatively little to work with. Steve Buscemi does Steve Buscemi as the closet-junkie head of the CIA’s South American operation; we know how well he’s yet again succeeded playing himself yet again because of how grateful we are when he finally takes a bullet to the head late in the movie. Parker Posey literally phones in her entire manically measured performance as the alcoholic wife of Sam Rockwell’s character, while Tom Waits appears fleetingly during the film’s final stretch in a Straight Story-like moment as the bitterly long-estranged brother of John Malkovich’s character. As fine as they all are in these somewhat thankless roles, I still felt a little bad for each of them, as if they were simply being used as accessories in an otherwise brilliantly executed crime.

But Malkovich is the coolly distant solar body that the entire film revolves around. In a way, he directs the movie from within his performance, endowing it with layer upon layer of characterization, one that we fully trust even as his character Chris constantly shifts from reliable to unreliable, from innocuous to lethal, from quirkily deceptive to deadly honest. It’s a masterful orchestration of the finest possible kind; he runs continual laps around his entire beloved persona and career, rallying from the edges of it, even as he obviously tires of being perceived the way he is, in spite of simultaneously relishing in it. To come from the somewhat humbly starry roots of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company to international renown for his personality alone, at the level of wink-wink reticent actor-celebrities such as Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro and Willem Dafoe, requires a depth of self-knowledge that, by the age of nearly 73 now, penetrates so deeply into one’s body and psyche that you can really only delight in the cosmic joke of it all, and yet a cosmic joke that you yourself somehow ingeniously managed to construct and maintain. That’s what Malkovich’s performance as Chris entirely understands and shares with us, while never fully letting go of the reins of the film, nor of the reins he has attached to us as members of his devoted audience. When Chris confidently remarks, “Still got it” to himself in the wake of a brutally violent (and much deserved) sniper shooting at the stunning climax of Wild Horse Nine, we know immediately that it’s also Malkovich commending himself on his level of distinctively sniper-sharp, chameleon-like interpretive abilities as a veteran actor. Bring him his flowers now.

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