John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell remind us of America’s darkest era, when brown suits were “in”.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Next up: Wild Horse Nine, the fifth feature from UK writer/director Martin McDonagh. I’ve seen all his previous films to date: In Bruges; Seven Psychopaths; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; and The Banshees of Inisherin (and even his 2004 Oscar-winning short Six Shooter). I would’ve shown up for this even if Heartland hadn’t chosen it as this year’s Centerpiece Screening. It’s another volatile mixture of McDonagh’s key ingredients — razor-sharp black comedy, gunshots, F-bombs, familiar faces from his previous films, and men in tight, non-romantic relationships sharing a life trajectory only to face harsh endurance tests while we watch to see who flinches first with bloodying results.

The Gist: John Malkovich (the Being John Malkovich guy) and Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards, Seven Psychopaths) are Chris Carlisle and Lee Chesterfield, CIA assassins hanging around Chile in the late summer of 1973 for, uhhhhh, a long-term work project not long after Salvador Allende became the region’s “first democratically elected Marxist”. The longtime partners are sent on a week-long diversion from Santiago over 2000 miles away to scenic Easter Island, where they can see the giant heads and whatnot. Yes, the island and the heads have “indigenous” names, but this is the McDonagh-verse, with all the contemporary epithets, slurs, and anti-PC mockery that implies even before “PC” was a thing.

Sightseeing ensues, with occasional interruptions from their shadowy profession, such as check-ins from their annoying boss (Steve Buscemi). Also complicating their getaway: the elderly Chris is dying of cancer and dealing with slow-onset dementia. He does love seeing the heads, the roaming herds of wild horses, and the same pair of young ladies (Mariana Di Girólamo and Ailín Salas) they keep bumping into everywhere they go. But his conditions have erased his filters — he’s blabbing about dark secrets in the middle of casual small-talk, sharing proprietary information about upcoming events, and beginning to record his memoirs before everything in his head disappears. Given a lifetime of covert-ops accomplishments — his body count, the tally of governments he’s helped destabilize, the conspiracies he’s played a role in — his newfound penchant for grandfatherly oversharing is a massive security risk. And it’s all on Lee to decide when TMI is too, too much.

The familiar faces: Parker Posey (I last saw her in another assassin drama, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) has a few scenes as Lee’s Concerned Wife — a cuckolding shrew, yet still concerned, because such is the nature of their messy ’70s marriage. The esteemed musician Tom Waits (Seven Psychopaths) has one scene as someone Chris hasn’t talked to in years. John Heffernan (a nasty Luther serial killer and a onetime thorn in the Queen’s side on The Crown) is a British tourist with an unfortunate case of the Well Actually’s.

The Impressions: Above all else Wild Horse Nine is a showcase for Malkovich, whose unpredictable sensibilities haven’t been tamed one bit as he’s gotten older. It’s not his first time playing a CIA agent — in the grand Malkovich-verse scheme, Chris is the alt-timeline version of his In the Line of Fire company man if he’d never gone rogue, or his spook from the Red series if he’d never retired. Chris’ amoral work ethic doesn’t drift far from those gents’, but his challenges are a very different set to explore. He lived through decades of chaos-agent missions against all odds, but his degraded state might get him killed before the cancer can finish feeding on him…though occasionally his self-defense reflexes kick in and refocus his attention in a heartbeat. Audience members who’re likewise graying and maybe facing end-stage quality-of-life decisions may relate, if they overlook his whole “government-contracted hitman” career thing.

(In terms of seeing spies spiraling into senility, it’s interesting to contrast Chris’ travails with Jonathan Pryce’s moving performance in Apple’s Slow Horses as an MI5 MVP who lived years into retirement before his faculties unwound.)

While instability is Malkovich’s bread-and-butter, McDonagh recruits Rockwell for the cast-against-type role of the most rational guy around. Between his partner’s disposition and his high-strung boss’ sinister agenda, that leaves Lee stuck between them, forced to make the hard choices and ride her on their impulses. It’s a slight change of pace from his usual wacky characters (see also: this year’s try-hard Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die) that still affords him a share of the laughs, though as the straight man for once. One of the funniest scenes is a basic two-hander with the duo reclining by a particular set of heads: as Malkovich rambles on minus some facts that have disappeared from his head, editor Mikkel E. G. Nielsen (an Inisherin vet) just keeps cutting to a series of Rockwell’s stunned-speechless reactions, each one goofier than the last.

Vicarious tourists will love gazing upon the Rapa Nui panoramas behind them — the rolling hills of Rapa Nui (visually a distant cousin of Inisherin‘s Irish emerald horizons), the Pacific Ocean surrounding them, and of course those silent stone Moai in various sizes, shapes, and states of erosion. For those of us who’ll likely never see those mountainous mugs in person, they’re a wonder to behold even as, days into their stay, Our Antiheroes begin taking them for granted, to the point where Chris begins riffing on their peculiarities, filmed from behind almost MST3K-style.

Wild Horse Nine is sometimes a winsome travelogue, sometimes two louts shouting insults at each other and at innocent bystanders, and sometimes a thoughtful conversational piece between two friends who know each other better than anyone else, and who have us rooting for them to a certain extent, despite the part where they’re two stone-cold professional killers with no remorse about what they’ve done and no self-reflection about whether or not they did the right things by “just following orders” given by a government that straight-up destroyed other countries’ attempts at self-governance for the sake of perpetuating their own way of life and World-Power 101 ranking, not necessarily in that order.

As the mood teeters between lamentation and mentally occluded absurdity, same as in his past works McDonagh convinces us to empathize with the deadliest of sinners, at least on the lowest baseline level that we arguably have in common. The tension builds more leisurely than usual for him, focusing more on the interpersonal slow-burn until the big climax when guns are drawn and anything can happen because he’s never, ever been precious about his characters or written toward a conventionally “happy” ending. From the first traded barbs to the tradecraft shenanigans to the final shot, we’re left wondering how well we all really know each other, even our own closest friends and family, and whether they’ll show up for us at The End. In a better world that’d go for countries as well as for old men.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after the brisk Wild Horse Nine end credits, which are accompanied from start to finish by the Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time”, more than a little on-the-nose. I’m more familiar with the Ramones’ cover of it, because I’m not quite that old yet.