
As you go about watching “Outlaw Posse” you feel as though the writer-director Mario Van Peebles was handed a homework assignment to list his favorite Western movies and that he completed that task by writing a screenplay, but there is quite a lot that he hasn’t done on his own. Throughout the film, much of the story is a comparison to classics such as The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Blazing Saddles, Django Unchained, and of course, all those blaxploitation oaters that Fred The Hammer Williamson made in the Seventies there are most titles that you would have to look up. Van Peebles is clearly a fan of several Western movies but it is yet to be seen whether his own title can one day add to the American classics because, at this point, the film fails to meet the expectations in commercial success as well as storyline.
That said, the beginning of the film is simply an all-time moment, one that could have been a film in its own right and which raises expectations that the rest of the events cannot satisfy. We see a group of rough guys Neal McDonough, Cam Gigandet, and the inevitable M. Emmet Walsh invade a dusty and deserted town in New Mexico in the early 1900s and head to the local saloon to quench their thirst. One of the patrons is stalking an Indian customer until Chief Van Peebles steps in and takes care of the loudmouth. This is a very funny and visually appealing scene that pays tribute to the forefathers of the genre while promoting things that were seldom seen or heard in such movies.
It is also revealed, quite early in the first season, that after the Civil War, Chief and Angel (William Mapother) were responsible for moving out a shipment of southern gold that was meant to go to the West as compensation for the former slaves. The two ultimately fell apart, which ended with the Chief taking the gold and the hand of Angel and burying it in a land that most whites did not have the gut to set foot on and making an agreement with the Chief to come back one day and take it from there. Now is the time and Chief assembles a small crew including an old Carson (John Carroll Lynch), a young Southpaw (Jake Manley), mystic knife-weaving queen-like figure Queenie (Amber Reign Smith), and D.C. Young Fly as a minstrel Spooky who justifies his profession by claiming, “Make people laugh and you can get away with saying anything”.
Of course, Chief is not the only one with eyes on that substantial amount of gold and that leads to why Angel and his gang show up at the place of Decker (Mandela Van Peebles) who coincidently happens to be Chief’s estranged son.
Despite the fact that Decker’s father has long been absent, Angel is eager for Decker to meet his father and join them so their group can ambush them and take the gold along with the Chief’s hand. Decker defies their instructions and his wife is kidnapped along with his house, which is set on fire by Angel. While chasing after the gold, Chief and the rest of the crew meet many characters who are diverse in their personalities and he and Decker try to restore their bonds that were strained before the predictable Spoiler Alert locating the booty and, Spoiler Alert, firing brawl.
The film “Outlaw Posse” is not the first film for Van Peebles in this genre as he was also in the film “Posse” which he directed, as a Western in 1993. Of course, it has no connections to this film, whose name is pretty much irrelevant. That film was a history lesson in which Van Peebles, the character was desperate to remind the audience that there were black cowboys, laudable sure, but the detracting point was he was so dedicated to this idea he failed to actually tell an entertaining story. This time, the history lessons are more sublime yet the main protagonist still fails to create an engaging and compelling story. Most of the material is overused and familiar to such an extent that even the most potentially progressive conceit on hand is the idea that the outcasts because of race, creed, gender, or economic standing need to unite for a bigger goal rather than bickering amongst themselves becomes redundant with the idea that turned ‘Blazing Saddles’ into more than just a mess of jokes.
It appears that instead of turning this weakness into strength, Van Peebles prefers to have his characters espouse more modern points of view in the hope of replacing genre cliches with contemporary perspectives. Unfortunately, such points of view are only sometimes entertaining or educational. What is even more troubling, though, is that throughout the film, a hyperkinetic visual style is used as well, with an unfixed camera and rapid movements that are simply unnecessary.
There’s a lot that is wrong with the film but let’s not get hung up on the details as it is, in fact, not a boring film. There are a number of entertaining sequences throughout and I also appreciate a few of the individual scenes. I have talked about the brilliance of the robbery sequence in the beginning and I can say there are at least one or two other awesome scenes. One of them is a bank heist that Chief’s gang pulls off using a method I will let you find out and another in which they run into an ethnic enclave owned by one of Chief’s old friends like Cedric the Entertainer, which is a greener version of Bartertown in ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.’ There are some gratuitous cameos from the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Edward James Olmos, but most of the actors in the film manage to do their jobs quite well I was particularly impressed by Lynch as Carson, the seasoned, tired hero, and Smith as the unpredictable Queenie. I thought Van Peebles also performed well he looks like a younger version of Fred Williamson, who fits the style that few of his contemporaries can do so convincingly now.
In the end, it fails under the title ‘Outlaw Posse’ though there are enough moments out of the blue to help you forget about it every once in a while. It is able to touch the peaks reached by the films it tries to revive and yes I even find it even worse when compared to the recent takes of the genre as Walter Hill’s often stunning sadly underlooked ‘Dead for a Dollar’. That being said, let’s not pretend that the cinema halls are filled with Westerns at the moment, so if you are really intrigued by the genre and do not wish to wait for the first two of Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon’ flicks which will be released this summer, you might enjoy some of it, of course assuming your expectations aren’t soared too high.
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