The first time John Malkovich played a killer trained by the C.I.A., he was a man of many disguises, elusive and unpredictable as the wind. The film was “In the Line of Fire” (1993), and his character, nicknamed Booth, was a psychotically disgruntled agency alum, plotting to murder the President with a custom-built plastic gun and a bullet that he stored in a rabbit’s foot. His other weapon was his voice, at once coldly precise and dangerously soft; never before had Malkovich’s distinctly odd cadences sounded so menacing. Booth spent a lot of time on the phone, taunting a veteran Secret Service agent (Clint Eastwood) about his failure, decades earlier, to protect John F. Kennedy. “Late at night, when the demons come, do you see the rifle coming out of that window?” he drawled. “Or do you see Kennedy’s head being blown apart?”

That tragedy looms heavily, but also with an air of jokey inconsequence, over “Wild Horse Nine,” a new film written and directed by Martin McDonagh. It begins in 1973, in Santiago, Chile, where Chris Carlisle (Malkovich), a longtime C.I.A. operative, is stationed. Early on, he reminisces about the popularly elected regimes that he’s toppled, from Guatemala to Congo, and—here his voice drops to a low murmur—acknowledges a prominent role in the Kennedy assassination. Yet, despite this dabbling in POTUS-cide, Chris is something of an anti-Booth; he has too much debonair wit, too much bon-vivant style. He and his loyal protégé, Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell), are headed to Easter Island for a week, and Chris, looking dandy in bright-colored neckties and a porkpie hat, has no use for disguises. As for a rabbit’s foot, forget it: Chris’s luck has run out. He’s dying of cancer and has decided that Easter Island will be his last hurrah. He wants Lee, whose marksmanship he trusts as much as his friendship, to hasten his departure.

Lee, whose frequent exasperation with Chris is a sure sign of love, has his own problems back home in the U.S., chiefly a “drunk wife who fucks clowns.” That’s Chris’s odd, harsh appraisal, and it is repeated, mirthlessly, when we finally meet said wife (Parker Posey), badgering Lee over the phone. Whenever McDonagh hits a stale comic patch like this, he retreats swiftly into the trappings of plot: Lee is understandably less than thrilled about Chris’s instant-death wish, but, by all appearances, M.J. (a cranky Steve Buscemi), the C.I.A.’s South American bureau chief, already has a finger on the trigger. Chris, often strung out on morphine, his memory and his wits addled by cancer, has become a jaw-flapping liability.

Despite the far-flung setting and the spy-thriller machinations, then, we are in terrain that McDonagh knows all too well: the bloody buddy comedy. Like his film “In Bruges” (2008), “Wild Horse Nine” follows two hit men on holiday, and, like “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), it conjures the verdant magic of a remote island setting. Yet the flavor of the proceedings is markedly different. In “Inisherin,” a bitter clash between two friends, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson (who both also starred in “In Bruges”), felt exquisitely of a piece with the local elements: the mists, the jagged rocks, the salty tang of the sea. The outdoors lent a wry, soulful grandeur to the characters’ expletive-riddled bickering.

There are profanities aplenty in “Wild Horse Nine,” as there are in all McDonagh’s movies and plays. (Cut out the F-bombs and most of them would run barely an hour.) And the vast expanse of Easter Island, majestically filmed by the cinematographer Ben Davis, is astonishing to behold. (Lee himself can’t resist filming with a Super 8 camera, and his grainy images add welcome blips of texture.) Feral horses roam the landscape, and they give the movie both its title and its desired genre: McDonagh strives for the laconic sweep of a classic Western. But not all material can command a space this vast, and I suspect that John Ford himself might have struggled to wring much poetry from Chris and Lee, two ugly-American blowhards wisecracking their way around paradise. Really, the shenanigans could have been transplanted anywhere: picture two guys farting at Stonehenge for an hour or two, only to realize, like the ancients before them, that it makes an awfully nice burial ground.

Within such comedic confines, and with a surprising dearth of violent mayhem, “Wild Horse Nine” strains for thematic expansiveness. Ostensibly, the film is about the mixed blessings of friendship, the soul-corroding nature of violence, the horrors of U.S. foreign policy, the possibility of redemption, and the inescapability of death. But it’s the stiffest, least cohesive film on those subjects you could imagine. McDonagh organizes his scenes into thematic blocks, and whenever he loses interest in one block he simply switches, mechanically, to the next. The conversations that he’s written for Chris and Lee toggle between humor and pathos, between self-satisfied snark and self-conscious elegy, and there’s barely a moment when you don’t hear the grinding of tonal gears. (You hear it in the music, too; the Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time” isn’t the subtlest of needle drops.)

McDonagh’s dialogue is famed for its staccato crackle, but here he slows the characters’ rhythms, as if to accommodate the diminution of Chris’s body and mind, and packs dead air around everyone’s lines. Yet within those rhythms Malkovich does locate odd, narcotized flashes of poetry. His voice is lower and shakier than usual, and the gleam in his eyes sometimes goes ambiguously dull: are Chris’s mental lapses real, or part of some long con? Chris hasn’t lost his saucy erudition; one of his funnier bits is a mid-breakfast monologue on why “gay countries,” like France, produce the highest-quality cheeses. But he seems on precarious ground, no longer certain of his punch lines. He is also rediscovering the guilt and terror of his Catholic upbringing, and he wonders if, after a life spent overthrowing democracies—the coup that will depose President Salvador Allende is in the offing—he has a chance in hell of entering Heaven.

Easter Island is, of course, dotted with towering volcanic-stone figures with large, elongated faces. Chris and Lee refer to them as “the big heads,” and when a tourist couple gently note that the Indigenous term is “moai,” Lee erupts in fury—though Rockwell, who’s good at modulating an explosion, makes clear that Lee is exaggerating his rage for Chris’s benefit. Earlier, at the Santiago airport, they had an awkward run-in with two Chilean college students, Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), one of whom explained that the Indigenous name for Easter Island is Rapa Nui. “You shouldn’t even know the word ‘Indigenous’ at your age,” Chris replied.

It’s telling that McDonagh hammers the word “Indigenous” repeatedly and contemptuously—as opposed to, say, “local” or “Polynesian.” Back in the seventies, the term was less prevalent in English than it is today, but McDonagh, not for the first time, is eager to mock the language of the contemporary liberal scold. Farrell’s “In Bruges” character wasted no opportunity to call a dwarf a midget; in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017), McDonagh’s most pugnacious and polarizing work, Rockwell played a racist cop, annoyed that “persons of color” had replaced his favorite epithet. You could argue, I suppose, that a film shouldn’t be reduced to its characters’ politics. But, by now, it’s hard to assume that these smug linguistic sensitivities—wielded only, of course, in response to other people’s smug linguistic sensitivities—belong to anyone other than McDonagh himself. And they speak to the narrow view that he takes of his chosen setting and the harrowing historical episode into which he’s seen fit to shoehorn his characters.

“Three Billboards” hinged on the racist cop’s reformation, and “Wild Horse Nine,” with less outrageousness and more finesse, undertakes its own dubiously reconstructive exercise. Despite its misanthropic pose, the film wants very badly for us to like and even love Chris, to find him as charming as he is cancel-worthy. Chris regards his role in the deaths and disappearances of thousands of innocents with a weary shrug—and, on rare dark nights of the soul, a piddling note of regret. At one point, he notes his incongruous fondness for the local insects. “Sometimes I feel like I care more about the moths of Chile,” he says, “than I do about the people of Chile.”

McDonagh grants us a touristic view of Chile masquerading as a geopolitical one, and his dramatic aims are as obvious and limited as his emotional agenda. We’re meant to find Chris pitiable because of his diagnosis, and we’re meant to find him redeemable when he offers sincere advice to the naïvely idealistic Monica, warning her of the forthcoming horrors of the Pinochet regime. The final passages of “Wild Horse Nine” are at once swift and interminable, the action-thriller elements snapping into place at last, only to be hijacked by an exceedingly long goodbye. You can’t accuse McDonagh of not knowing his priorities; we are to shed bountiful tears for Chris, with perhaps a few to spare for his collateral damage. Some of us may be forgiven for resisting the invitation. I remained dry of eye—and rooted for the cancer. ♦