Outlaw Posse

Starts with a good premise: Confederates hid gold in Montana. Let's go get it! And there's a bad guy! He's bad. And there's other downtrodden people. They're good! And there's a multiethnic, multicultural settlement. Yay! And there's a complicated father-son subplot. And a kidnapping! And some musical performances. And some bad singing.

Confused? You will be.

Dialogue? Yes, there is dialogue. Is it stiff? You bet!

Acting? You bet. There are actors doing acting. Is it good acting? Yes! Given what they had to work with in terms of dialogue and plot, for sure. In fact, all of these actors should be given awards for trying so hard, despite the poor hand they were dealt.

I paid $6 to rent this film. If I had feelings, they'd be hurt.

I was pretty excited to see this movie. I'd just recently rewatched Mario Van Peebles' first film as a director, NEW JACK CITY, and it was much stronger than I remember. I enjoyed NEW JACK CITY when it first came out, but found it over-directed, though I did appreciate that its core was straight out of classic Warner Bros gangster movies, ALA Cagney and Bogart, but updated for a modern political context, particularly among the African American community. Van Peebles followed that movie up with the western POSSE, which also had an activist political edge to it. Nearly 30 years later, Van Peebles returns with OUTLAW POSSE, not a sequel, but maybe a spiritual sequel (probably due to a rights issue), playing another equally cool and anachronistically hip cowboy who returns after 20 years to seek a hidden cache of stolen gold before assorted other bad guys can get. The film starts strong with a cool spaghetti western vibe, but that quickly fades as the story slows to a rather dull pace. Still, Van Peebles brings some exciting visuals to the proceedings and many uber-cool actors appear in bit parts, probably more as a favor to Van Peebles than for a paycheck in this modestly budgeted film, which is pretty cool of them. Whoopi Goldberg, Cedric the Entertainer, Edward James Olmos, Allen Payne, Neal McDonough, and M. Emmet Walsh in his final film role all appear in bit parts. Overall, OUTLAW POSSE is worth watching for fans of westerns and/or fans of 80s/90s throwback nostalgia, but it's nothing brilliant and I'm not sure I'll ever feel the need to rewatch it.

Mario Van Peeles further tarnishes his already uneven career with this irritating movie about a group of outlaws (a "posse" of them, if you will) out to steal some gold so they can fund a communist village run by Cedric the Entertainer. There's a lot of discussion over the endlessly interesting topic of reparations and almost every white character has to go on some kind of tirade in which they berate minorities and women. You know the drill. There's even a few lines about Columbus being a mass murderer and a female character has to go out of her way to randomly announce her (historically inaccurate) sexual proclivities.

That's right! Mario van Peebles has decided that it's more important to brow-beat his audience with both cultural and economic Marxism that he's forgotten to tell a good story. Wait, didn't he already make a Posse movie anyway, like 30 years prior? I'm baffled that, in this day and age of 2024 that a fairly low budget movie like this with such a messy script can attract so many big actors, though many of course like BLADE RUNNER costars M. Emmet Walsh and Edward James Olmos far past their prime. In fact I was pleasantly surprised to see that they both are (at least at the time of filming) still alive.

Van Peebles unfortunately splits himself as star and director again with both his performance and directorial prowess veering all over the place. At times he plays his character huge and ostentatious like a bargain bin copy of Samuel L. Jackson while other times like a far more subtle sensitive "man of few words" for no other reason than to suit tone of the scene. Each scene has a completely different tone than the last. There's a thousand unexplored themes like why his character was such a bad father and how the group has endless amounts of cash when all their robbery attempts constantly end in failure, but the movie is not as interested in that. It's really more about hopping from one political point to another plus there's just too many characters to flesh any one of them out.

The silliest part of the movie has to do with the party coming across a Mexican man with his family just hanging around a burnt-out house. As to why a family would still be sitting in a house after it had burned down, it's anyone's guess, but they aren't fixing the damage or even attempting to build some other kind of stop-gap shelter. They're all just standing around waiting for the scene to start. The posse then decides to avenge the family's house by riding into town and bamboozling the mayor into signing the deed to the property away by handing him cash (which the previous scene implied they didn't have). Did I miss something? They then murder the mayor and his men anyway and give the deed to the family. So, how binding is that deed going to be when the state's law enforcement find the mayor and all witnesses dead? Also, why is the family still just sitting around that burnt-out house at their exact same marks when the party comes back from this side-quest? I have a feeling none of this even occurred to anyone on set or else they just thought it was funny.

A couple scenes do stand out as fairly technically well-done however, and the musical score consistently evokes the best of Spaghetti Westerns of yesteryear. The score is so bombastic at times that you'll think you're watching a BLAZING SADDLES style sendup but the film otherwise takes itself deadly seriously. For the most part, the film looks pretty good though a lot of key lines get lost with mumbling delivery by Cedric and Mario. Overall it's a baffling experience in that the movie presents itself as an old fashioned revisionist Western from the 70's but the core of it is as brimming with current-year agenda and philosophy as it gets. It would be far more aggravating if the film weren't so amusingly sloppy.

I just saw the film this evening and thoroughly enjoyed the uplifting, educational, and entertaining depiction of African and Native American life in the Old West.

With a colorful ensemble cast including Van Peebles and comedic giants Whoopi Goldberg and Cedric the Entertainer the film calls to mind the old spaghetti westerns of the past but with a more historically accurate depiction of the various backgrounds colors and lifestyles of some actual historic figures who had a tremendously positive influence on the 19th century western landscape.

A great must see production by the Van Peebles clan!

This is an abstract review of the film. The man who made this knew what he was doing. I *think* I get it. Those that don't yet may never be enlightened. Sounds like a bold statement, yes; but this is a reflection of our society, and many of us don't get our current society outside of our own perspectives. If you can't see the world through others' eyes, you won't get the deeper meaning of this movie.

Why not hope for a better future? Do we all need to be vengeful, fearful and spiteful? Can we love and forgive and maybe change the way we structure things to encourage more balance? I think we can and will. If it catches on, this film will be seen in the future as a bellwether.