It isn’t a Martin McDonagh movie unless you’ve got two morose guys – one old, one not so old – who do nothing all the livelong day but bitch and snipe and quarrel and exchange barbed bromantic dialogue while occasionally going off on a plaintive tangent about nothing at all, incidentally revealing something very wrong with their friendship. If it can be called that. In The Banshees of Inisherin from 2022, the older guy decides he wants nothing more to do with the younger guy; in In Bruges from 14 years earlier (of which this latest film is almost a retread or maybe B-side), the older guy has an awful secret he is keeping from the younger guy.
Wild Horse Nine brings McDonagh to a US setting with American (not Irish) characters and dialogue. But as in another US-set film – 2012’s Seven Psychopaths – Americanness can bring out something less interesting in McDonagh: more violence, more strenuous sweary machismo, less comedy, less charm. Yet there is something interesting and watchably acrid in the pairing of Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich, with Malkovich unspooling long speeches in that unmistakable nasal croon or whine, often concluding with his lips parted in a pursed-lip pout, a mannerism that leaves the audience unsure exactly how ironic or contemptuous he is supposed to sound.
