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.
