Review: Take a head trip with 'Wild Horse Nine,' a vacation comedy about the CIA's dark deeds

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Set us as preferred Whether in Missouri or Bruges, an isle off the coast of Ireland or a speck in the Pacific Ocean, a Martin McDonagh movie whisks audiences someplace remote for a detached view of the mess we’ve made of civilization.Human society continually tries to organize itself around religion, politics, empathy and law.

His whip-smart and violent comedies are insights into why it keeps failing.“Wild Horse Nine,” an exemplar of the format, is about two CIA agents, Chris and Lee (John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell), enjoying a getaway on Easter Island.It’s 1973 and the men are stationed in Santiago, Chile, where the U.S.

has spent millions of dollars on a propaganda campaign to prevent the socialist Salvador Allende from winning the presidency.When Chileans vote for him anyway, Richard Nixon gives secret orders to “kick them in the ass,” empowering Henry Kissinger to tank the country’s economy, raise inflation, fund paid protesters and stoke extremist polarization.“We came here to destabilize your country, and it’s going great,” Chris brags to a pair of flabbergasted young Chilean women, Monica and Alicia (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas), fellow tourists who gape at this Yankee old-timer in dismay.

In a few months, a military coup will install Gen.Augusto Pinochet as dictator and begin to disappear liberal dissenters.

The folk singer Victor Jara (Aron Hernández), the Woody Guthrie of Chile, is also in Easter Island to play a show and he, too, will soon be machine-gunned by the Army.McDonagh doesn’t show us this (and the soundtrack leans more on Jara’s mentor, Violeta Parra).

But he’s definitely hoping you leave the theater and look him up.Movies At 72, John Malkovich is still working relentlessly, contemplating mortality and finding absurdity everywhere, from octopus attacks to the Oscar...