PLAYING THE HITS

John Malkovich Is So Good at Being John Malkovich

There’s something very familiar about “Wild Horse Nine.” Why do people think that’s a bad thing?

There’s nothing wrong with playing the hits.

Have you ever gone to a concert where the band was touring their new album and didn’t play the hits? Outrage. Refund. Jailtime.

Yet often in the world of movies, revisiting the classics and leaning into what a filmmaker is known for and celebrated for—cinema’s version of playing the hits—is seen as a liability. It’s fodder for criticism or dismissal. Me? I think it’s gratifying. It’s kind of what I’m looking for.

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I bring this up because the award-season contender Wild Horse Nine is now in theaters, after achieving status as the most-played movie trailer of all time. (It still plays in my head when I close my eyes.) The film, written and directed by Martin McDonagh and starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, is now the subject of some internet—brace yourself for the arrival of the worst word in the world—discourse, as happens when a movie’s buzz starts to include the big O-word: Oscar.

McDonagh is the celebrated Irish filmmaker whose movies include In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and The Banshees of Inisherin. His specialty is very talky films where whip-smart dialogue revealing uncomfortable aspects of the human condition is interrupted by casual graphic violence and a somber wit.

Wild Horse Nine is, naturally, being held up against McDonagh’s previous work, so it’s no surprise that, when describing it, film-critic colleagues I’ve spoken to are pretty evenly split in comparing it to In Bruges and Banshees. Lots of “it’s like In Bruges, but…” and “think of Banshees, with…” talk happening when Wild Horse Nine is brought up.

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Kevin FallonEditor-at-Large, Obsessed

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