Outlaw Posse

While I am not particularly keen on Western movies, I do sit down to watch one every now and again. And since I had not heard about "Outlaw Posse" prior to watching it, I didn't really know what I was in for, nor did I have much of any expectations really. And that meant that writer and director Mario Van Peebles had ever opportunity to entertain and bedazzle me.

The storyline is fairly straightforward and enjoyable. So writer Mario Van Peebles, whom also directed and starred in the movie, managed to put together something that was good. If you enjoy Western movies, then you might get a kick out of "Outlaw Posse".

"Outlaw Posse" has a good cast ensemble, with the likes of Neal McDonough, Cam Gigandet, John Carroll Lynch, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Cedric The Entertainer, Whoopi Goldberg and Mario Van Peebles, all in bigger or smaller roles. Needless to say that the acting performances in the movie were good.

I found this 2024 Western movie to be entertaining enough, though it was hardly an outstanding foray into the Western genre. It had enough of the archetypical Western spirit and feel to it to actually work out well enough.

My rating of "Outlaw Posse", from writer and director Mario Van Peebles, lands on a five out of ten stars.

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.

I had the unpleasure of watching Outlaw Posse this pass weekend, it ended up more like an Outlaw Nightmare, what a piece of trash this turned out to be. One would think with a famous father in the movie making business Mario would be better at it, his acting has gotten worse if it could sink any lower, in every since of the word, it was pathetic, the script was lack luster, the acting laughable. My question is what were they thanking, really, Whoopi Goldberg a stage coach driver, why not a camel crossing a desert? I would guess, and I could be wrong, Mario keep thinking, if he keep trying he might get one right, after all these years, it still a lost cause. A movie made with rhyme or reason. My final observation, is this, who keeps giving this guy money to waste on these fail attempts, such a shame.

At the time of my writing this, 41 people have actually given this movie 10 stars. My first reaction was, "who are these people?" They couldn't possibly be rating the same movie I just watched. This movie was so unrealistic, poorly scripted, had a convoluted story and was so predictable. It became crystal clear the writer was far more interested in pushing a liberal social agenda than actually making a western movie. It would have been much cheaper to simply write a letter-to- the-editor and list all the social grievances included in the film. (I was a little surprised I didn't see windmills in the background.) And on a technical point. I had no idea that when an arrow was shot and hit someone in the neck, it would enter and leave half on one side and half on the other. Pretty amazing.

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.