The CIA Men of Wild Horse Nine Are Sorry

In writer-director Martin McDonagh’s debut film, In Bruges, two hit men hide out in the eponymous Belgian city, waiting for a call from their boss. The older man,…

In writer-director Martin McDonagh’s debut film, In Bruges, two hit men hide out in the eponymous Belgian city, waiting for a call from their boss. The older man, Ken (Brendan Gleeson), loves playing the tourist. “Bruges is the most well-preserved medieval town in all of Belgium, apparently,” he recites from his guidebook. His companion, Ray (Colin Farrell), disdains the provincial pleasures of what he calls “fucking Bruges.” “I used to hate history, didn’t you?” he says.

“It’s all just a load of stuff that already happened.” But Ray is so racked with guilt over a botched hit, no wonder he’d rather pretend the past didn’t happen. The only problem is that he sees it everywhere he looks. Wild Horse Nine, McDonagh’s fifth and most recent feature film, is structured a lot like In Bruges. Both center on two men wandering through an exotic locale, largely unimpressed, frustrated by one another and consumed by regret.

The order to kill or be killed forces one of them to choose between personal loyalty and professional duty. For the men of In Bruges, this duty is to the ethical code of the hit man. In Wild Horse Nine, contract killers have been replaced by CIA agents, glorified mercenaries who are bound to protect not democracy so much as American interests. Wild Horse Nine isn’t just built like a McDonagh movie: It sounds and thinks like one too.

Having started his career as a playwright with The Beauty Queen of Lehane and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, McDonagh still writes the kind of dialogue—witty, too witty at times—meant to be played to the back row. The billboards in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri constitute a near-haiku of minimalist free verse: Raped while dying / And still no arrests? / How come, Chief Willoughby?

In response to his wife’s postcoital dirty talk in that movie, Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) jokes that he thinks he’s heard that line in a Shakespeare play. “You dummy. It’s Oscar Wilde,” his wife (Abbie Cornish) flirts back. It is that tension between sweeping cinematic vistas and peculiar, theatrical language that produces McDonagh’s signature effect: pleasing, jarring, a bit off kilter.